10 Years of CoEvolution Quarterly: News That Stayed News 1986

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News That Stayed News

Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly
EDITED BY ART KLEINER AND STEWART BRAND

6“

COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY,” writes Stewart Brand
in his afterword to this anthology, ‘was founded to
see what would happen if an editor were totally un-
leashed. I would print anything that kept me turning
its pages.”

Through forty-three issues and ten years of pub-
lishing, COEVO earned a reputation as one of the
most free-spirited, wide-ranging, and challenging
ventures in American journalism; it was a partici-
patory project in which editors, contributors, and
readers engaged in a continuing interchange that
occasioned some of the most vital writing of the de-
cade since the magazine’s founding in 1974. Its pages
were home for many of the period’s leading writers
and artists, including Paul Ehrlich, Ursula Le Guin,
Jerry Brown, Wendell Berry, R. Crumb, Dan
O’Neill, Gary Snyder, Ivan Illich, and Ken Kesey—
all of whom are represented in this collection of COE-
vo’s most enduring articles. Topics range from the
biology of communities and human DNA damage to
animal stories and the Amanda Madison Memorial
Nonsense Box at Smitty’s Bar.

The term coevolution was introduced by Paul Ehr-
lich and Peter Raven in their study of the predator—
prey relationship of caterpillars and plants. They
found that eaters and the eaten progressively evolved
in close response with each other—cevolved. The
CoEvolution Quarterly was just that: a quarterly that
chronicled, through its writers and its readers, the
dynamic evolution of what was best and liveliest in
contemporary cultural thought and practice.

In this volume are examples of reporting and story-
telling that truly meet Ezra Pound’s definition of lit-
erature: “news that stays news.” “Every day of the five
years I worked {as editor of COEVOLUTION QUAR-
TERLY},” writes Art Kleiner, coeditor of this collec-
tion, “I was conscious that we were printing material
that could last long beyond the lifespan of a typical
magazine issue. . . . Here is the best of that mate-
rial.”

ISBN: 0-86547-201-7

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Ten Years of

(@FVOLUTION

Quarterly

News That

1974-1984

Stayed News

EDITED BY ART KLEINER AND STEWART BRAND

NORTH POINT PRESS 1986 SAN FRANCISCO

Copyright © 1986 by The Point Foundation, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number:85-60865
ISBN:0-86547-201-7 (cloth) / 0-86547-202-5 (paper)

North Point Press
850 Talbot Avenue
Berkeley, California
94706

Cover design by David Bullen

Table
of Contents

Acknowledgments
Art Kleiner

Introduction
Art Kleiner

CoEvolution and the Biology of Com-
munities (Spring 1974)
Paul R. Ehrlich

Salons and Their Keepers
(Summer 1974)
Stephanie Mills

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System
of the Biosphere—the Gaia Hypothesis
(Summer 1975)

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

For God’s Sake, Margaret: A Conversa-
tion with Gregory Bateson and Mar-
garet Mead (Summer 1976)

Stewart Brand

The Sun Riots (Spring 1975) and
The B & G (Summer 1976)
Steve Baer

Some Mice (Summer 1976)
Robert Horvitz

The Space Crone (Summer 1976)
Ursula Le Guin

Poem for the Living (Fall 1979)
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn

Winning (Summer 1976)
Ron Jones

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Table of Contents

Biogeographical Provinces (Fall 1976)
Raymond Dasmann

The Lefthanded Bear and Other Animal
Stories (Fall 1976)
J.D. Smith

Animal Story Letters

How to Run the Arms Race Backwards

(Spring 1977)
Stewart Brand

The New Class (Spring 1977)
Herman Kahn, Jerry Brown,
and Amory Lovins

Yellow Diamonds (Winter 1977/78)
Malcolm Wells

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry
(Spring 1978)

I Was Armand Hammer (Spring 1978)
J. Baldwin

First Week of November, 1978—

and More Anne Herbert (Winter 1978-—
Fall 1982)

Anne Herbert

Human Harm to Human DNA
(Spring 1979)

Stewart Brand, with extensive quotes from
Bruce Ames

A Short History of America (Fall 1979)
R. Crumb

Six Days of Dying (Winter 1980)
Mary Catherine Bateson

‘““Where’ve You Been, Stranger?”
(Summer 1981)
Bryce and Margaret Muir

How Not to Commit Suicide
(Summer 1981)
Art Kleiner

vi

68

74

A?

83

89

113

116

130

133

142

165

170

178

183

Feminism and Sadomasochism
(Spring 1982)
Pat Califia

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the
Woman Behind It All (Spring 1982)
Will Baker

How I Became a Human Being
(Spring 1982)
Mark O’Brien

Don’t Beg: Take Control
(Summer 1982)
Tom Parsons

Doing a Job (Summer 1982)
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

On Farting (Summer 1982)
Michael Kimball

A Friend to the Children (Fall 1982)
Dan O'Neill

Born to Fail (Winter 1982)
J. Baldwin

Kokopelli—The Humpbacked Flute
Player (Spring 1983)
Gary Nabhan

Rachelann: A Remembrance
(Spring 1983)
Leo Dreu

Good, Wild, Sacred (Fall 1983)
Gary Snyder

Handfast (Winter 1983)
Sallie Tisdale

Silence Is a Commons (Winter 1983)
Ivan Illich

Events Are the Teacher (Winter 1983)
Katy Butler

206

215

228

241

245

251

267

277

282

291

293

298

Table of Caments

Surviving in Small Business
(Spring 1984)
Paul Hawken

Coffee Hour: America’s True Religion
(Spring 1984)
Jim Burklo

Burying Jed Kesey (Summer 1984)
Ken Kesey

The Difference Between Writing
and Building Racing Engines
(Summer 1984)

Harry and Larry Ingham

309

313

316

324

Who Do You Think You Are?
(Fall 1984)
Freddy Bosco

Afterword: Outtro
Stewart Brand

Appendix: A History of CoEvolution
Quarterly
Art Kleiner

326

329

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Acknowledgments

Decisions to do this book were made
independently but simultaneously at
Whole Earth (between me and Kevin
Kelly) and at North Point Press.
Those two decisions were melded
into one project with uncommon
ease and courtesy. I’m grateful to
North Point editors Jack Shoemaker
and Tom Christensen for their sup-
port and help. Stewart Brand and I
selected the material, making our ar-
duous choices by give-and-take over
the Electronic Information Exchange
System computer network (which al-
lowed me to do most of the editing
of this book at home). Kevin Kelly
was also involved in that process.
We had useful suggestions from J.
Baldwin and Richard Nilsen. Levi
Thomas, Jonathan Evelegh, and
Cindy Craig helped with some of the
clerical work of the project; Andrea
Sharp and David Cohn put in some
accounting/negotiating support.

I’m grateful and indebted to the
people I have known and worked
with at Whole Earth over the years,
who have taught me what making a
magazine is about. These people in-
clude the other editors I worked with
at CQ: Stewart Brand, Anne Her-
bert, Stephanie Mills, Jay Kinney,

Richard Nilsen, Joe Kane, and
Kevin Kelly. They include the de-
signers and artists: Kathleen
O'Neill, Don Ryan, Rebecca Wil-
son, James Donnelly, Isabella Kirk-
land, John Prestianni. They include
the guardians of consistency—type-
setters and proofreaders: Evelyn Eld-
ridge-Diaz, Susan Erkel Ryan, James
Donnelly, Ted Schultz, Hank Rob-
erts, Nancy Dunn, Kara Adanalian,
Annette Jarvie, Angela Gennino.
They include people who supported
the readers, or supported the opera-
tion: Andrea Sharp, David Burnor,
Dick Fugett, Ben Campbell, Lorrie
Gallagher, Jonathan Evelegh, Arnie
Kotler, Debbie Hopkins, David
Cohn, Lyn Gray, Jim Stockford, Ka-
thy Parks, Matthew McClure, Cindy
Craig. And they include contribu-
tors from Whole Earth past and pres-
ent: J. D. Smith, Rick Fields, An-
drew Fluegelman, J. Baldwin, Peter
Warshall, Tom Ferguson, Mike Phil-
lips, Paul Hawken, Barbara Robert-
son, Steven Levy. Also thanks to Rob
Garross, who introduced me to the
magazine in the first place. . . .

A.K.

Art Kleiner

pens, COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY
was started in 1974 with proceeds
from the Catalog.) Stewart Brand
has two talents common to all great
magazine editors: the ability to
gather together a family of brilliant
contributors, and the ability to piss
them all off from time to time.* CO-
EVOLUTION’s extended family in-
cluded luminaries and arrogant ex-
hippies (‘‘some of us are famous and
some are smug, Stewart once wrote
in the magazine’s Gossip section)—
but the magazine was rarely cowed
by any of them. Stewart’s first loy-
alty was always to the readers, as rep-
resented by his own emphatic but
open-minded judgment.’
COEVOLUTION experimented con-
stantly, in ways that a magazine with
advertising can’t. Stewart was always
trying something that no other mag-
azine publisher would dream of

were quarterlies, and their recommendations
were compiled in 1972 into the 452-page
Last Whole Earth Catalog, a National Book
Award winner, best-seller, and culture chang-
er. A 1974 addendum, the Whole Earth
Epilog, and COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY it-
self, continued to cover how-to books, tools,
and more with Whole Earth-style reviews; in
1980 Stewart and the rest of us Whole Earth
staffers recompiled the Catalog into the gar-
gantuan 608-page Next Whole Earth Catalog.

4. That ability to anger contributors yet hold
them seems to be endemic to magazine edi-
tors; see James Thurber’s The Years With Ross,
for instance. Stewart and New Yorker founder
Harold Ross seem to have had the same two
techniques for infuriating people: blithe in-
consistency about detail, and not listening to
what other people thought they should do
with the magazine.

5. Not that Stewart was the on/y influence.
As CQ evolved, more and more people con-
tributed in great and small ways to its overall
creativity; many of their names are listed in
the Acknowledgments to this book. CQ was
blessed with a warmhearted, capable, consis-
tent staff which made possible much of the
flavor and value of the magazine.

Xil

doing. Guest editors, for instance:
every four issues or so, Stewart would
relinquish his normal ironclad con-
trol over the entire magazine, find
someone with a special topic to
cover, put the staff into their hands
for the quarter, and disappear. Or
the financially unsuccessful Bold/
Lite experiment: to avoid offending
readers with explicit sex, yet not feel
hamstrung, Stewart created a “Bold”
section of the magazine with raun-
chy material intact, and gave sub-
scribers a choice of CQ with or with-
Out it.

CQ opened up many debates and
topics for the first time. Space colo-
nies: By printing Gerard O’Neill’s
and his own arguments in their fa-
vor, Stewart annoyed many of his
ecologically minded contributors
and readers. So he printed thezr argu-
ments. The controversy lingered for
several issues (some old CQ readers
can still get angry when they think
of it) and ultimately modified the
ideas of some of the space-colony
planners. Other themes got early no-
tice in CQ before becoming promi-
nent elsewhere. The Gaia hypothe-
sis. Voluntary simplicity. Argu-
ments against metric conversion.
Personal computers. The resurgence
of the antiwar movement. The flat
tax. Critical evaluation of maga-
zines. The effects of chemicals on the
human gene pool.

Most importantly, COEVOLUTION
published a lot of material—essays,
reporting, and story-telling—that
will endure as “news that stays
news,” to quote Ezra Pound’s def-
inition of literature.° Hence this

6. In ABC of Reading, 1934, published by
William Morrow & Co., Inc. The definition
was quoted in the review of ABC of Reading
in both the Last and Next Whole Earth
Catalog.

Introduction

book—a collection, in one place, of
what we think is the most lasting
work COEVOLUTION published.
You'll find little of purely historical
interest—for instance, although
space colonies were debated fer-
vently, we didn’t include any of that
material, already reprinted in a book
that Stewart edited (Space Colonies,
Penguin, 1978). If you’re interested
in the history of the magazine (its
life is, after all, tied intimately with
many cultural and political move-
ments of the sixties, seventies, and
eighties, particularly in California)
you'll find an issue-by-issue discog-
raphy in the Appendix.

If you’re familiar with COEVOLU-
TION, you'll notice a few enduring
pieces are missing in this bbok—
Ron Jones’s “The Third Wave,”
Carol Van Strum’s “The Most Un-
usual Letter We've Ever Received,”
and ““Trees’” by Jean Giono. That’s
because these pieces, and others, ap-
peared already in the Next Whole
Earth Catalog (Random House,
1980). With the limited space avail-
able (we could easily have compiled a
volume twice this size and stz// left
good material out), we chose to re-
print very few pieces from the Cata-
log. That pruning has allowed sun-
light to nurture more forgotten

blossoms—like Ron Jones’s other
story, “Winning” (p. 60). Similarly,
a few articles—Wendell Berry’s ‘‘Po-
etry and Marriage,” for instance—
were left out because they subse-
quently saw publication in other
books (in this case, Standing

By Words, North Point, 1983).

This is a book I’ve wanted to see
published since I was first introduced
to COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY in
1976; a friend handed me a copy and
said, “I think you'll like this.” I
quickly became a fan; ordered the
back issues that were still in print;
searched for earlier ones in used
bookstores. When I began writing
journalism, COEVOLUTION was the
first place I submitted my ideas (I
suspected, correctly, that they’d be
responded to with understanding
and high spirits). Later I was hired
by Stewart Brand—first to help re-
search the Next Whole Earth Catalog,
then as editor of COEVOLUTION it-
self. Every day of the five years I
worked there, I was conscious that
we were printing material that could
last long beyond the lifespan of a
typical magazine issue (even COEVO-
LUTION, whose perfect-bound back
issues are kept on many people’s
bookshelves). Here is the best of that
material.

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Pek. EMRLICH

CoEvolution
and the Biology
of Communities

COEVOLUTION got its title and its
bent partly because I was bit early on
by a series of biologists—Ed Rick-
etts (via John Steinbeck’s Monterey
books), Aldous Huxley (in print and
person), Paul Ehrlich, and last and
deepest, Gregory Bateson. Assistant
Professor Ehrlich supervised my ta-
rantula “research” at Stanford in
1959, when the Stanford Biology
Department was still mostly molecu-
lar biology and an ecologist was hard
to find. (In truth they’re still hard to
find, amid the proliferation of
“ecologists.”’)

Starting with The Population Bomb
(1968), on through Ecoscience (1977)
and Extinction (1981) and numerous
appearances on the Johnny Carson
Show and the lecture circuit, Ehrlich
has been the hard-science spokes-
man for population control. Unbe-
knownst to most of his fans, Paul is
basically a butterfly freak. He’s a
first-rate population biologist with a
reputation that has grown steadily
through his career. His original

1965 paper on coevolution, coau-
thored with botanist Peter Raven
(“Peter and I did the whole thing
over coffee; didn’t look at a single or-
ganism’’) is one of the most cited in
the literature.

This later paper of Ehrlich’s* is
still one of the best scans of coevolu-
tion as idea and as natural history
that I’ve seen, and it sounds like Paul
talking, that is, like Walter Win-
chell. How better to start this book
than with its founding metaphor,
from Issue 1 (Spring 1974).

Stewart Brand

In recent years ecologists have been focusing
more and more attention on the properties of
communities of organisms. There has been a
renaissance of what we used to call “‘synecol-
ogy, and several new schools of community
ecologists have emerged. One school has fo-
cused its interests on the concepts of niche,
species diversity, and related topics. Members
of this school often deal with questions such as:
“Why are there more species of lizards on is-
land X than on island Y?”’; “What simple en-
vironmental measures can I use to predict the
number of bird species in a grassland?”; or
“What limits the similarity of sympatric spe-
cies?” Another approach to communities
which has gained prominence recently is a ho-
listic-mathematical approach. Many measure-
ments are made of a complex ecological sys-
tem. Then the analytic and simulation

* This paper was the introduction to a symposium at the
twenty-ninth Annual Biology Colloquium, 1968, pub-
lished in Biochemical Coevolution, 1970, Oregon State Uni-
versity Press, Corvallis, Or., Kenton L. Chambers, ed.

Paul R. Ehrlich

techniques of systems analysis are used to iden-
tify important variables and predict future
states of the system.

This colloquium deals with another new
way of looking at the properties of communi-
ties. This way consists of examining the pat-
terns of interaction not in an entire community
but between two groups of organisms, groups
which do not exchange genetic information
but which do have a close and evident ecologi-
cal relationship. Peter Raven and the author
called the evolutionary interactions within
such systems “coevolution” in order to empha-
size the reciprocal nature of the relationship.
This reciprocity is abundantly evident in the
butterfly-plant systems which we investigated
and in herbivore-plant systems in general.

PLANTS AND HERBIVORES

Many of the characteristics of plants, such as
spines, pubescence, nutrient-poor sap, and so-
called ‘secondary plant substances,” have
evolved in large part in response to selection
pressures created by herbivores. The chemicals
seem to be especially important, serving as
both repellents and pesticides. Herbivores, on
the other hand, have responded to the defenses
of plants in diverse ways. Many obviously have
adopted detoxifying systems to deal with the
noxious compounds produced by the plants.
For instance, the plant Lotus corniculatus occurs
in populations polymorphic for the presence of
cyanogenic glucosides. The plants containing
the cyanogenic glucosides produce hydrogen
cyanide when they are injured. Not surpris-
ingly, these plants are much less bothered by
herbivores than their noncyanogenic cohorts.
Some herbivores, however, eat both kinds of
plant with equal gusto. One of these is the
blue butterfly Polyommatus icarus. Lane sug-
gested that the larvae of the butterfly detoxify
the cyanide by converting it into thiocyanate
with the enzyme rhodanase.

Some insects have been so successful in deal-
ing with plant poisons that they now recognize
and are attracted to compounds which repel
most herbivores. Indeed one “herbivore,” Homo
sapiens, consumes large quantities of plants be-
cause of the many uses he has found for “plant

4

pesticides.” He uses them in the role for which
they evolved—as herbivore poisons (e.g., pyre-
thrum) and as herbivore intoxicants (various
hallucinogens) and in roles unrelated to their
original purpose (pepper, quinine, tobacco).
Perhaps the best all-around response to plant
defenses is found in aposematic organisms
(those that advertise their defensive abilities by
conspicuous patterns and coloration, such as
the monarch butterfly). These organisms take
up the plant chemical defenses and use them
for their own protection. The monarch butter-
fly, for instance, is avoided by most birds be-
cause it contains vertebrate heart poisons.
These poisons are obtained directly from the
monarch’s milkweed foodplants. Monarchs and
similar organisms gain additional advantage
from the avoidance of their foodplant by other
herbivores.

Many herbivores have adopted strategies
to avoid plant defenses rather than overcome
them. Some, for instance, may feed on parts of
the plant which have relatively weak mechani-
cal or chemical defenses. An example of this
may be flower-feeding or pollen-feeding by
many lycaenid butterflies, bees, and various
beetles including scymnine coccinellids, der-
mestids, cantharids, and so forth. Other herbi-
vores time their attacks carefully to avoid plant
defenses. Paul Feeny reports that the larvae of
the winter moth Operophtera brumata will not
mature satisfactorily on oak leaves two weeks
older than those on which the larvae normally
feed. Larval development in nature is com-
pleted rapidly, early in the season before the
tannins are laid down in the young oak leaves.

Plant-herbivore coevolutionary systems usu-
ally involve “selectional races.” Strong selec-
tion pressure is put on plant populations by
herbivores, and any improvement in plant de-
fenses is at a selective premium. Herbivores, in
response, must find ways of dealing with the
plant defenses or they will starve. The tight-
ness of the situation is exemplified by the win-
ter moth case described by Feeny. The timing
mechanism of the moths must be extremely
precise to guarantee that the larvae hatch just
as the young leaves are appearing. If they hatch
too early, they starve before the leaves appear;

CoEvolution and the Biology of Communities

if they hatch too late, they are defeated by the
tannins and other plant defenses. If the oaks
can evolve ways of depositing tannins even ear-
lier, or produce other defenses, the moths will
lose the race, unless the moths can evolve a way
of dealing with the oaks’ defenses.

Perhaps the most unusual coevolutionary
system related to herbivory is that composed of
swollen-thorn acacias and obligate acacia ants,
brilliantly investigated by Janzen. In this sys-
tem, ants serve as substitutes for the usual de-
fensive mechanisms of acacias. The ant acacias,
for instance, lack the bitter-tasting chemicals
which are characteristic of other acacias. The
ants live in the swollen thorns of the acacias
and feed on specially modified leaf tips. If the
ants are removed, the acacias are killed by her-
bivorous insects. As long as the ant colony per-
sists, the ants attack the herbivores and keep
them from eating the acacias; the ants also de-
stroy plant competitors of the acacias.

PREDATOR—PREY RELATIONSHIPS

A coevolutionary system which is the homo-
logue of the plant-herbivore system is the
predator-prey system. Like the plant-herbivore
system, it, in essence, is a selectional race. The
prey is selected for predator avoidance and the
predator for prey finding. This system is much
more familiar to us than the plant-herbivore
system; for some strange reason most biologists
seem to have the impression that plants just sit
around defenseless, waiting to be devoured!
All biologists, however, are familiar with the
sharp senses and speed of the antelope, the
stealth and fangs of the tiger, the spines of the
porcupine, and the eyes and talons of the
hawk. This is hardly the place to go into the
vast literature on this subject, but I do want to
point out that the relationship between preda-
tor and prey is all too often viewed as static, in
spite of the evolutionary work done on Bzston,
Cepaea, Natrix, and mimetic assemblages.
There is every reason to believe that most prey
species are continually “evolving away” from
their predators, and that the predators are
either trying to catch up or get ahead. Extinc-
tion may very often be the result of a “win” by
either side.

In investigating predator-prey systems,
most of the emphasis has been placed on the
nature and evolution of devices used by prey to
avoid being eaten. There is, of course, a vast
literature on protective coloration in both ver-
tebrates and invertebrates. An equally impres-
sive literature is accumulating on biochemical
defense mechanisms in arthropods as a result of
the work of Thomas Eisner and his associates.
Although some research has been done on
predator behavior—such as the classic work on
orientation in bats by Griffin—much less work
has focused on this side of the relationship.
Recently, however, there has been an upsurge
of interest in the functioning of predators in
general, due in particular to the work of Holl-
ing in analyzing the components of predation.
Once we understand predation more thor-
oughly, it should be far easier to investigate
the reciprocal aspects of predator-prey systems.
Perhaps those most amenable to analysis would
be systems involving parasitoid wasp predators
and their insect prey. Various components of
attack and defense have been analyzed in these
systems, but to my knowledge none of them
have been approached from a coevolutionary
standpoint.

PARASITE—HOST SYSTEMS

Parasite-host systems are similar to predator-
prey systems in that one would expect a con-
tinuous selectional ‘“‘race’’ between host and
parasite. The race would be somewhat differ-
ent, however. It is advantageous for the host,
like the prey, to “escape.” But it is not advan-
tageous for the parasite to kill its host, while
killing is advantageous for the predator. The
counter argument, that it is not advantageous
for a predator to eat too many of its prey either,
will not hold water. In the vast majority of
cases, we must assume that group selection is
not operating and that predators which are ef-
fective killers leave more offspring than those
which are not. There is anecdotal evidence that
individual predators may kill far beyond their
individual needs for consumption. More im-
portantly, there is no known evidence that any
predatory species except man does not feed to
repletion, given the opportunity. Conservation

5

Paul R. Ehrlich

of prey resources, if it occurs, is not through
the exercise of altruistic restraint by individual
predators. With most parasites, however, re-
straint is not altruistic. Reproductive or feed-
ing behavior which results in the death of the
host all too often results in the death of the
parasite as well. The problem of the parasite,
then, is somewhat more difficult than that of
the predator. It must often take care that it
does not overtax its resources—for the individ-
uals which do overtax leave fewer offspring
than those which do not.

Host-parasite relationships have been stud-
ied evolutionarily in some instances, although
the evolutionary response has usually been
studied one side at a time. Some of the most
widely known examples of evolutionary re-
sponses involve man: hemoglobin responses to
malaria and thalassemia as a host response and
the development of drug-resistant bacteria as a
parasite response. One host-parasite system is
now being studied extensively from both sides
by Dr. J. H. Camin and his associates at the
University of Kansas. Working with rabbits
and rabbit ticks (Haemaphysalis leporis-palus-
tris), they have been able to demonstrate an
immunity to tick attack developing in the rab-
bits. Ticks that get on a rabbit after others are
already feeding either cannot attach or can take
much less blood. Therefore, they produce
fewer eggs or none at all. Immunity 1s tempo-
rary, only lasting ten to twenty days if it is not
challenged. The ticks show a circadian rhythm
in dropping off the rabbits which causes the
ticks to concentrate in rabbit warrens and
tends to synchronize the life cycles of the indi-
vidual ticks. They, therefore, get on the rabbit
en masse, rather than a few at a time. Many
other aspects of the rabbit-tick system have
been under investigation by the Camin group,
including the fascinating question of why the
rabbits have not evolved a long-term immu-
nity. The circadian rhythm of the ticks is, by
the way, relatively independent of the rabbit
physiology (entrained by photoperiod), which
makes an interesting contrast with the Euro-
pean rabbit flea in which the reproduction of
the flea and its transfer from the adult rabbit to

6

the young rabbits is controlled by the hor-
monal changes in the pregnant female rabbit.

Many other evolutionary responses have
been inferred in connection with host-parasite
systems, usually as “adaptations” of the para-
site to the host and host responses (of which
various immune reactions are the outstanding
examples). The intimate relationship between
parasites and the hosts which we consider to be
“vectors” have also received considerable atten-
tion, but little evolutionary study. We know
that vectors and vectored tend to occur to-
gether at the right time and place, but we do
not know in most cases what kinds of selective
pressures each places on the other. For in-
stance, are Wuchereria populations and mos-
quito populations engaged in a perpetual dance
in which a constant disruptive selection pres-
sure occurs in both populations? Microfilariae
tend to occur in the peripheral blood at the
time that the mosquito vector is feeding. Pre-
sumably the earliest and latest mosquitoes have
the smallest chance of picking up the parasites.
This could lead eventually to a polymorphism
of feeding times in the mosquito population,
followed by a similar response in the parasite.
Or other selection pressures may make either
early or late feeding hazardous, so that direc-
tional selection would operate on feeding time.
Or, other selective factors may override the ef-
fects of parasite infection and maintain a rather
rigid mosquito feeding time.

Even in situations where we have some idea
of the evolutionary dynamics, as in the case of
sickle-cell anemia in man, we have not been
able to examine the entire pattern of coevolu-
tion. For instance, although we know that
hemoglobin S gives considerable protection
against Plasmodium, we do not know the entire
mechanism of protection or the exact kinds of
selection pressures to which the parasites are
subjected. The glutamic acid-valine residue
substitution which changes hemoglobin A to
hemoglobin S results in a fifty-fold increase in
the viscosity of the hemoglobin. The phago-
trophic feeding of the Plasmodium is inhibited,
as the formation of food vacuoles becomes diffi-
cult. Changes occur in the surface of infected

CoEvolution and the Biology of Communities

erythrocytes, making it possible for the liver to
recognize them and remove them. The malaria
parasite might evade this defense by evolving

a new feeding strategy, perhaps by developing
an enzyme to reduce hemoglobin viscosity.
Whether there is any trend in this direction is
unknown. To my knowledge, there has not
been an attempt to compare features of strains
of, say, Plasmodium falciparum, from areas of
high and low Hb* frequency.

MIMICRY

Closely paralleling the host-parasite case would
be the coevolutionary interactions involved in
Batesian mimicry. The mimic, of course, plays
the role of the parasite. Its strategy is to take
advantage of the model without destroying it.
The model gains nothing—and faces the dan-
ger of a “credibility gap” developing in its po-
tential predators. For at some point, if the
mimics get too common, most predators will
associate only happy experiences with what
originally was an aposematic pattern in the
model. Such a development, of course, ruins
the game for both players. One would expect
that the model would evolve away from the
mimic at a maximum rate, everything else
being equal. It is to the mimic’s advantage to
maintain a maximum of resemblance to the
model, until that critical point mentioned
above is reached. Then the advantage becomes
a disadvantage—the mimic is conspicuously
patterned, but predators now associate that
pattern with tastefulness. As a result, selection
would tend to move the mimic away from the
model into a more cryptic pattern. It is not in-
conceivable that imperfect resemblances, now
attributed to mimicry in the process of being
perfected, are quite the opposite. They may
represent mimics moving away from the model
of mimics in an equilibrium situation between
perfect mimicry and cryptic coloration. Devel-
opment of a polymorphism in which one or
more forms are nonmimetic may also be the re-
sult of such a reversal of the selective situation.
As Ehrlich and Raven pointed out, there is
no sharp line between Batesian and Mullerian
mimicry. (In Batesian mimicry a palatable spe-

cies resembles an unpalatable one {the model];
in Mullerian mimicry, two different unpalata-
ble species resemble each other.) In all cases

it obviously is of advantage to the Batesian
mimic to become distasteful if it is physiologi-
cally possible to do so. In butterflies, at least,
it appears that the usual source of noxious
compounds is plant biochemicals, so that food-
plant relationships must play a large role in the
evolutionary dynamics of any given situation.
A butterfly has several different routes to ob-
noxiousness open to it. If it occurs on a food-
plant which does not produce an appropriate
compound, it may switch foodplants. If it is
feeding on a plant with an appropriate com-
pound or its precursors, the butterfly may
evolve the ability to use the compound or syn-
thesize a noxious compound from precursors.
Finally the foodplant of the butterfly may
evolve an appropriate compound, which then
may be picked up by the butterfly. In the latter
case the mimetic butterfly would be involved
in a complex of “selectional races” involving
the model, the foodplant, and predators. As
the foodplant becomes more and more obnox-
ious, the butterfly must find ways of “breaking
even” by avoiding poisoning or “winning” by
turning the poison to its own advantage. Pred-
ators may simultaneously be undergoing selec-
tion for ability to discriminate between model
and mimic, and for “resistance” to the obnox-
ious properties of the model. Of course the
presence or strength of such selection will de-
pend on many variables. For instance, in some
cases butterflies in a single population may
make up such a small proportion of the targets
of a single predator that selective influence on
the predator will be negligible.

In many ways mimetic assemblages make
ideal subjects for the study of coevolution—as
has been amply demonstrated by the Browers,
Phillip Sheppard, and others. We understand a
great deal about them, and yet there are many
questions unanswered. For instance, detailed
studies of putative Mullerian complexes are
needed to answer a variety of questions. One
would expect that the various members of the
complex would have different effects on preda-

7

Paul R. Ehrlich

tors since they presumably are picking up poi-
sons from different sources. As an example, one
Mullerian butterfly complex consists of a Lyco-
rea species, presumably feeding on Asclepiada-
cae or Apocynaceae, several Ithomiines on So-
lanaceae, two Heliconius on Passifloraceae, and a
Perrhybris with an unknown foodplant. Ideally,
of course, each member of the complex would
give strong and similar reinforcement to all lo-
cal predators, so that multivalent noxiousness
might evolve in various members. It would be
particularly interesting if biochemical mimicry
could be detected in some of these organ-
isms—that is, two quite different chemical
compounds obviously selected to give similar
effects in the same predator. Rothschild has
suggested that this occurs with defensive
odors.

Although it is clear that, in general, Bate-
sian complexes should evolve toward Mullerian
complexes, the fate of Mullerian complexes is
less obvious. It would probably be unwise to
think of them as stable “end points” of evolu-
tionary sequences. If this were the case, one
might picture all of the diurnal Lepidoptera
(and perhaps many other herbivores and small
predators) in an area eventually being recruited
into one large complex. It would really save the
memories of the birds, but the birds would not
have to remember for long because they would
starve to death. Obviously, the larger a Muller-
ian complex gets, and the more similar the
defenses of its members become, the more
“profit” accrues to a predator which devises a
way of consuming the Mullerian mimics. Thus
a large selective premium is placed on a strong
stomach, and one would expect predators
evolving rapidly to deal with the entire com-
plex. If this happens, the advantages of be-
longing are reduced and one might expect the
complex to break up.

PLANTS AND POLLINATORS

Mullerian mimicry is one good example of
mutualism. There are many others, many of
which doubtless would provide good materials
for coevolutionary studies. Perhaps the most
widely studied mutualistic coevolutionary sys-
tem is that of flowering plants and their polli-

8

nators. Relationships in this system range from
extremely close and clearly reciprocal to casual
and possibly unidirectional. Best known of the
“tight” relationships are those of the yucca and
the yucca moth and of the fig and the fig wasp.
In the latter case, both insect and plant are to-
tally dependent on one another—the relation-
ship is obligate in both directions. A wide
variety of intimacy has been revealed in the re-
lationships of bees and Onagraceae by the ele-
gant investigations of Linsley, MacSwain, and
Raven. A large number of bee species visiting
Ocnothera were found to be oligolectic, collect-
ing pollen for their larval cells exclusively from
plants of that genus. Many others, however,
were polylectic, collecting pollen from Oenothe-
ra and from plants of other genera and fami-
lies. The tightest relationship discovered was
that of the bee Andrena rozeni and Camissonia
claviformis. The plant, which has a flower well
suited for bee pollination, presents its pollen
and nectar in the late afternoon (it is presum-
ably derived from a morning-opening species).
Andrena rozeni only gathers pollen in the late
afternoon, even though residual pollen is avail-
able early in the morning. The mouthparts of
A. rozeni are elongated, permitting it to ex-
tract both nectar and pollen simultaneously,
and these are very rarely taken from other
plants. Mating likewise takes place at the flow-
ers of Camissonia claviformis, the males cruising
over them before the first appearance of the fe-
males. Of course, many pollination systems
have been studied from the point of view of
floral morphology, color, and odor in relation
to attracting the proper pollinators: long co-
rolla tubes for hawkmoths, red color for hum-
mingbirds, huge widemouthed nocturnal flow-
ers for bats, chemical attractants in orchids,
orchids shaped as females to lure male insects,
and so forth. It is not clear in most cases, how-
ever, what evolutionary responses in pollinators
have been elicited by the vast smorgasbord
with which they are presented. It would bea
mistake to assume that the response has not
been considerable, if subtle. It behooves a pol-
linator to get the job of feeding done with as
little energy and risk as possible. Each pollina-
tor is presumably programmed genetically to

CoEvolution and the Biology of Communities

respond to a “‘proper”’ series of stimuli—an ex-
act odor, color, or shape, or a series of odors,
colors, or shapes. Each pollinator has adopted
a strategy—in essence specialist or generalist.
Similarly, each plant has adopted a strategy. As
floras and faunas evolve together, the utilities
of the various strategies are going to change.
The specialist pollinator may find its food
source becoming too rare, or the generalist
pollinator may find the competition too stiff at
many of its sources. Conversely, the specialist
plant may find its pollinator going extinct, or
the generalist plant may find it is not getting
enough accurate transport. The end result of
any of these anthropomorphized possibilities is
a choice of “evolve or go extinct.” When the
behavior patterns of pollinators are more thor-
oughly understood, we shall appreciate more
fully the reciprocal nature of most pollination
systems.

COEVOLUTIONARY COMPLEXES AND
COMMUNITY STUDIES

It seems appropriate now to discontinue the
survey of coevolutionary complexes and return
briefly to the question of the consequences of
their study for community biology in general.
Community biology is concerned with the
composition of communities and the dynamics
of that composition. Community composition
is, in part, determined by physical tolerance
limits on the distribution of species. Deter-
mining the factors limiting distributions and
the ways in which organisms ‘“‘adapt”’ to the
areas they occupy is the preoccupation of a
branch of “physiological ecology.” Someone
once said that the usual conclusion of a study
in this field is the determination that the or-

ganism can indeed live where it lives. The
question of why those limits exist—that is,
why the organisms have not transgressed those
limits evolutionarily—is rarely investigated.
In some cases the answers may lie in the rela-
tionship of the organism to its physical envi-
ronment. For instance, many butterflies may
not have penetrated temperate regions simply
because they have been unable to develop satis-
factory diapause mechanisms. (This, of course,
immediately raises the question of why some
species have developed satisfactory mechanisms
while others have not.) In other cases the an-
swers probably lie in the area of coevolutionary
interactions. The presence of a “winning pred-
ator’ or the absence of a “‘beatable”’ foodplant
may limit a herbivore. A model may be, in es-
sence, “chased” by a mimic into an area which
the mimic cannot penetrate (perhaps because of
the distribution of its foodplant). We do know
that mimetic species often extend their range
beyond that of the model, ordinarily with a
rapid loss of mimetic pattern. However, we do
not know whether in any cases the mimetic
species is restricted to the range of the model
because of mimetic relationships.

Taking a coevolutionary approach to prob-
lems of community biology lessens the chance
of being seduced into “explanations,” such as
“competition from X limited the distribution
of Y.” If the limitation of X is due to Y, then
the two usually make up a coevolutionary sys-
tem. In order to understand the limitation, it
is necessary to understand the system. This
means that questions about selection, such as
were asked earlier, must be posed, and field
and laboratory experiments must be carried
out to find the answers.

STEPHANIE MILLS

Salons and
Their Keepers

From the original introduction

(Summer 1974):

The most powerful instrument of in-
tellectual community organizing is
the salon. I’m convinced of this after
seeing the effects of two small grants
from the Point Foundation {publish-
ers of CQ and the Whole Earth Cata-
/og} to Stephanie Mills for the pur-
pose of giving dinners.

When talk is intended to be good
instead of merely efficient, meta-
business gets transacted. Something
gels. The abbot of the San Francisco
Zen Center says that culture is what
happens when a number of people
know each other well. Maybe that’s
what gels.

A hostess with wit, culinary skill,
and access to people who ought to
know each other is all it takes.

Stewart Brand

The author is the same Stephanie
Mills who became a living symbol of
the movement for international pop-
ulation control, after giving a vale-
dictorian speech at Mills College in
1969 in which she said “I am terri-

IO

bly saddened that the most humane
thing for me to do is to have no chil-
dren at all.” She later edited Not Man
Apart and COEVOLUTION QUAR-
TERLY. In an essay in the Winter
1980 CQ called “Learning to Live
with Ambiguity,” she foreshadowed
her shift from international to local,
or bioregional, politics: “Eleven
years after announcing the apoca-
lypse Iam coming to realize that I
probably won’t get to watch the End
of the World in my lifetime. I. . .
have learned that doing unalloyed, or
sufficient good is {an} impossibility,
unless that good is so specific that it
may seem insignificant to the faith-
less and invisible to the demogra-
phers.” Now she lives on a farm in
northern Michigan where she ts writ-
ing a book, and involved in biore-
gional organizing.

Art Kleiner

Salon: The reception room of a Parisian lady of
fashion; hence a reunion of notabilities at the house
of such a lady, also a similar gathering in other
capitals. (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)

Salons are spaces, psychic spaces created to
draw the best talk from a gathering of minds.
Since the Renaissance, they have been ostensi-
bly agendaless gatherings for the sake of con-
versation. At the time of their French flourish-
ing, people were not so disillusioned with
words as we. Conversation had the status of an
art. Salons were its galleries.

. . words are not merely. . . a means to com-

Salons and Their Keepers

municate ideas, feelings and needs but an instrument
one likes to play and which revives the spirit. . .

A certain way in which people act on one another, a
quick give and take of pleasure, a way of speaking
as soon as one thinks, of rejoicing in oneself in the
immediate present, of being applauded without mak-
ing an effort, of displaying one’s intelligence by every
nuance of intonation, gesture, and look—in short,
the ability to produce at will a kind of electricity.
Quoth Madame de Staél, history’s most famous
saloniére.

Salons still exist, but the conversational aes-
thetic has vanished. Cocktail parties are not sa-
lons. The talk that takes place at cocktail par-
ties with its discontinuities and roving eyes
cannot be called proper conversation. Talk
shows might pass as a species of salon if they
were less self-conscious and plug-oriented, but
the quality of intelligence on talk shows is di-
luted. While it abounds in sharpness, it often
lacks the creative direction of good salon con-
versation. Talk shows are promiscuous. Salons
are organisms, collectivities which require
friendship and intimacy to function.

Attendance at the great salons of eighteenth
and nineteenth century Paris was habitual.
Different saloniéres (most of whom were
women) received on different evenings to avoid
conflicts with their friends’ gatherings. Much
of the brilliance and constancy of the salons
derived from the presence of core groups of
friends—the planets—who attended faithfully
and warmed the parties with friendship. Brio
and excitement were provided by rising and
falling stars shooting through.

During the eras of Enlightenment and Rev-
olution, Paris’ atmosphere was charged with
the ideas of progress and reform, political de-
bate, then intrigues—to depose the monarchy,
to save the republic, then to resist Napoleon’s
dictatorship. These philosophies and strategies
were aired and developed in the salons; there
cells of opinion throve and the French Revolu-
tion was accomplished. The vehicle was not
polemic, but conversation.

Julie de Lespinasse and Germaine Necker
de Staél each presided over the most luminous
and eagerly attended salon of her generation.
Julie died in the springtime of 1776, when

Germaine was just ten. Their lives over-
lapped—many of the members of Julie’s salon
also attended Mme. Necker’s Fridays. Thus
Germaine grew up surrounded by Julie’s con-
temporaries. And the two women were linked
by a lover—Hippolyte de Guibert, who may
have been Madame de Staél’s first, and was Ju-
lie’s last.

Julie de Lespinasse was the illegitimate
child of the Comtesse d’Albon. Therefore she
was propertyless. Her loving mother did at-
tempt to provide her an inheritance, but when
her mother died, Julie, in an excess of grief,
turned the money over to her brother. Penni-
less, she wound up serving her sister Diane and
brother-in-law Gaspard de Vichy as a governess
for four years, the last two of which were made
rancorous by the discovery that Gaspard was
likely her father.

Gifted with kindness, intelligence, and
tact, made miserable by her domestic situa-
tion, and unstimulated in the remote chateau,
she was ready to be rescued. At which point
Gaspard’s sister, the Marquise du Deffand, ap-
peared at Champrond for a visit. Here was a
witty, civilized woman, keeper of a notable Pa-
risian salon, sadly going blind. She perceived
in Julie a potentially charming companion,
and began to consider bringing her to Paris.

After about a year of negotiations with the
de Vichys, who feared that Julie might try to
claim some of her mother’s inheritance, Julie
took up residence with Madame du Deffand in
the convent of St. Joseph. (At that time French
convents provided a refuge for single women of
reduced means and were not very cloistered.
The residents could maintain apartments and
their particular lives within their hospitable
shelter.) In her correspondence regarding the
move, the Marquise had written a prophetic
word of warning: “I am naturally distrustful,
and all those in whom I detect slyness become
suspicious to me to the point of no longer feel-
ing the slightest confidence in them.”

At twenty-two, then, Julie de Lespinasse
became part of Madame du Deffand’s distin-
guished company of intellectuals with a grace
and ease that amazed them all. She was out-
wardly plain, but possessed, Grimm said,

JE At

Stephanie Mills

“The difficult and precious art of drawing out
the best intelligence of others.” Her relation-
ship with the Marquise lasted ten years, until
it was severed by a terrible schism.

Julie had begun to hold a small salon of her
own an hour or so before the Marquise’s six
P.M. arrival. When she descended early and
discovered Julie skimming the cream of the
conversation, she exploded in a fit of jealousy
and drove the usurper out. Furthermore, she
insisted that her friends declare their loyalty
either to her or to Julie. Many of the regulars,
including D’Alembert, went with Julie, and
set about arranging for her to have a salon of
her own. Such independence, for a woman of
her means and status, was unheard of at the
time. The novelty of their idea is testimony to
Julie’s genius as a salonieére.

Various friends provided the money to rent
a small house, furnish it, and pay servants.
Among the most generous of these was Ma-
dame Geoffrin, another saloniére, who sold her
most valuable paintings to provide Julie an
annuity.

While most Parisian salons offered lavish
dinners and feasts, Julie’s on the Rue Belle-
chasse was modest to the point of spartanism.
She was the enticement. In one of many pane-
gyrics on her skill as a hostess Marmontel said,
“She gathered her people here and there in so-
ciety, but she chose them so well that when
they assembled it was like an experienced hand
striking the chords of an instrument. To con-
tinue the simile, I might add that she played
on that instrument with an art that knew no
bounds.” Her gatherings verified the nickname
bestowed on her by Madame du Deftand—
“Muse of the Encyclopedia.”

While reigning as one of Paris’ luminaries
she was racked by two hopeless love affairs. To
one of her lovers she wrote, “Mon ami, society
offers me now but two interests. I must love, or
I must be enlightened.” The futility of her
loves made a personal hell undetected by her
friends. D’Alembert, who lived with her for
years, was shocked by the revelation of them
some years after her death.

Julie’s first great love was a gifted young
Spanish noble, the Marquis de Mora, who

12

struggled for years to obtain parental consent
to marry her. He struggled also with consump-
tion and was away from Paris for long stretches
of time. She began to console herself in his ab-
sence with the friendship of Guibert, and be-
gan the passionate, chiding correspondence,
which survives as a complex lament of a soul
tormented by remorse and unrequited love. As
the affair with Guibert ripened, Mora’s health
waned, and he died en route to see her. Julie
blamed herself for Mora’s death, and perhaps
masochistically threw herself into the pursuit
of Guibert.

“My thought, my soul can henceforth be
filled by you alone, and by my harrowing re-
grets.” But Guibert had made no secret of his
liaisons with other women, and married some-
one else. Julie died twelve months later, her
health slowly wasted by a cough, her anxieties,
and her increasing use of opium. What was
amazing, wrote her friend Morrelet, was that
“You would still find her interesting and ani-
mated in the midst of her daily increasing
weakness.”

Germaine de Staél had almost been hybrid-
ized to keep a salon. Jacques Necker, her fa-
ther, was Louis X VI’s Controller General. One
of the richest and most powerful men in Eu-
rope, he briefly held France’s fate in his hands.
Suzanne Curchod Necker, her mother, main-
tained a famous salon in Paris. Strict, ambi-
tious and intense, she provided Germaine with
an arduous education. Asa little girl, Ger-
maine attended salons peopled by the likes of
Diderot, D’Alembert, Gibbon, Marmontel,
and Grimm. They challenged her wits—she
responded with poise, and developed into the
most brilliant conversationalist of her time.
After her marriage in 1786, she began her own
salon, which became a powerful influence on
French politics thereafter.

When Napoleon’s star began to rise, she
sought to include him in her gatherings, but
Madame de Staél drove him up a wall; he
couldn’t abide uppity women. Viz this ex-
change between them at a dinner given by
Talleyrand: De Staél: “Who is the greatest
woman, alive or dead?’’ Bonaparte: ““The one
who has made the most children.” She had dif-

Salons and Their Keepers

ficulty comprehending his aversion to her. Her
excellent biographer, J. Christopher Herold,
suggests an explanation in Mzstress to an Age:
“The most prominent of her guests were drawn
not from among the enemies of his regime but
from its elite. . . . In Madame de Staél’s house
the schoolboys were encouraged to be disre-
spectful of their master; they unlearned the
fear on which his power rested.”

De Staé] threatened him further with her
writing. Her opus consists of more than thirty
works: novels, essays, elegies, treatises, and
dramas. De Staél, “The Empress of Mind,”
was so influential that Napoleon, “The Em-
peror of Matter,” exiled her after the publica-
tion of Delphine and later suppressed the publi-
cation of De /’A/lemagne.

Her base during her periods of exile was in
Switzerland at Coppet, her father’s chateau.
There she surrounded herself with her friends
and lovers. The salon went on. Her life and
the lives of her contemporaries were awash in
words. Wherever she went, she carried a little
green escritoire and wrote. The intelligentsia
kept lengthy diaries, corresponded volumi-
nously, and published their thoughts. De
Staél’s guests at Coppet played a parlor game
called petite poste in which they sat around a ta-
ble and, not speaking, carried on conversations
and flirtations by passing little notes.

When not thus occupied or conversing, they
wrote, acted in, or watched theatrical produc-
tions; or wrote letters to their friends down the
hall. Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, one of the
faithfuls, wrote, “I just returned from Coppet,
and I feel completely stupefied . . . and ex-
hausted by the intellectual debauches. More
wit is expended at Coppet in a single day than
in many a country during a whole year.”

Madame de Staél passed much of her exile
in travel, being received by nobility and sages
throughout Europe. It was said that there were
three great powers in Europe: England, Rus-
sia, and Madame de Staél. She was instrumen-
tal in bringing about Napoleon’s downfall,
compassionate enough to warn him of a subse-
quent plot on his life. She had the temerity to
demand absolute loyalty from her lovers, and
practice a double standard (‘‘I do not like my

friends to get married”). She was funky enough
to have lost the train of her gown during her
presentation at the court of Louis XVI.

Socializing in those days was continuous—
there was no distinction drawn between it and
business. Human relationships were the ma-
trix of a thriving life of the mind. Power was
wielded more personally. Madame de Staél
never held an office—she didn’t need to. Influ-
ence was enough. There was a whole lot of
nepotism going on, and it wasn’t always a bad
thing.

Though it is bad taste to condone nepotism
in a democratic society, it is one of the ways
things work. Members of an elite make their
way along the grapevine finding jobs and
homes, meeting friends and getting breaks by
word of mouth. Nepotism isn’t always reliable
or fair, but it is human. The mechanistic de-
vices that the free enterprise system uses to
place people aren’t always reliable or fair
either, and they can be dehumanizing. Perhaps
instead of condemning nepotism (the soft un-
acknowledged system) for the putative one,
nepotism could be made more useful and elites
diversified.

Thanks to nepotism, I received a foundation
grant to keep a salon. A “Cookenheim,” Nick
von Hoffman dubbed it. The foundation direc-
tor who supported it most actively had known
me for years. Another director who chipped in
is a lover of mine. Like Julie de Lespinasse, I
was subsidized by my friends to keep a salon.
Funding a grasshopper-pauper writer like me
to throw dinner parties catapulted that kind of
entertaining out of the realm of the well-con-
nected wealthy.

It started offhandedly. I’d been an environ-
mental activist for a while, traveling, speechi-
fying, making acquaintances. Eventually I got
out of that and began to write.

Meanwhile, the United Nations was plan-
ning its Conference on the Human Environ-
ment in Stockholm. Hopes were that it might
be a great occasion of world environmental
consciousness raising. A number of California’s
finest eco-freaks began making plans not just
to attend, but to launch a veritable flotilla of
counter-culturalists. Life Forum was the um-

13

Stephanie Mills

brella organization which transported some
poets (Gary Snyder and Michael McClure), the
Hog Farm complete with two buses, an estim-
able writer (Mary Jean Haley, who produced a
guidebook to the city and conference), Native
American and white members of the Black
Mesa Defense Fund, and its own staff to the
gallery and apartments at Pilgatan 11 in
Stockholm.

Many of this company were friends and
sought to involve me, suggesting that I do my
population schtick. But all I wanted to do was
give dinner parties. Almost within minutes
funding was available for me to join the gang
and set up the salon.

I wandered around Stockholm with my
transit map and phrasebook, breaking up gro-
cers wherever I went with my futile attempts
at Swedish. We had some fine parties there.

One of the best was the Whale Salon. It
starred Joan MacIntyre, head of Project Jonah,
who has made saving whales her life—she
came to Stockholm and reminded everybody
that it was living creatures being discussed;
Willy Wiloya, an Inuit, who hunts whales for

a living; Lee Talbot, a White House advisor on
wildlife conservation; a British cetologist; a
Canadian marine biologist who made passion-
ate entreaties that we not overlook the plight of
the salmon; and Michael and Joanna McClure.
Sundry members of Life Forum and Point
Foundation rounded out the party.

The highlight of the evening was Michael’s
reading of one of his Gargoyle Cartoons, a dia-
logue between a Swedish garter snake and a
Japanese garter snake on the relative merits of
being a seal, mackerel, or whale on a nice day.
This he did with deadpan vaudeville accents,
and cracked us all up. The group was so diverse
and alive that everybody delighted everybody
else, and a good time was had by all.

Such a good time in fact, that I was funded
to keep a salon in Berkeley for a year ‘“‘to bring
people together who wouldn’t necessarily
meet, to provide them with a leisurely gracious
environment in which to become acquainted
and intelligently converse, to encourage sky-
larking,”’ as I said in my proposal. It worked,
and did a fair amount of good. But that’s a
year’s worth of other stories.

LYNN MARGULIS
JAMES E. LOVELOCK

The Atmosphere
as Circulatory
System of

the Biosphere—

the Gaia
Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis (“Gaia”’ is pro-
nounced to rhyme with papaya)
treats the anomalous Earth atmo-
sphere as an artifact of life and com-
prehends the planet itself as a single
life.

The two old puzzles—1) How
does the bizarre Earth atmosphere
maintain itself? and 2) How does
fragile Earth life maintain itself ?—
solve each other. It took two remark-
able scientists—Margulis & Love-
lock—meeting outside their special-
ties to discover that convergence.

Lynn Margulis is a microbiologist
at Boston University. Her best-
known contribution is the symbiotic
theory of the origin of complex cells

(in her book Origin of Eukaryotic
Cells). Popularization of that theory
in The Lives of a Cell won Lewis
Thomas a National Book Award. He
even perpetuated Dr. Margulis’ mis-
spelling—‘“‘Myxotricha paradoxa”’
(should be Mixotricha, she notes).

James Lovelock is the envy of
every scientist, a successful free-
lancer. Working out of a thatched
cottage in the Salisbury Plain, En-
gland, this biospheric chemist has
accumulated some sixty-nine pat-
ents—most of them in what he calls
“gas pornography —chromato-
graphic analysis of gases at the parts-
per-billion level. The New Scientist
recently wrote of him, “In some
ways, Jim Lovelock—begetter of the
Gaia hypothesis—is one of the last
of the old-style natural philosophers.
A scientist who works from his own
home because he believes that lack
of security encourages creativity,
he has invented—among other
things—‘a magnificent Pandora’s
box’, the electron capture/detector
gas chromatograph. Most sensitive
of the analytical chemist’s tools, it
has been responsible for arousing
concern about pesticide residues and
Freons in the stratosphere, and may
yet help to show that, thanks to
Gaia, our fears of pollution-exter-
mination are unfounded.”

It was an honor for COEVOLU-
TION, in Summer 1975, to be the
first nonspecialist American publica-
tion to carry the Gaia Hypothesis (it
had earlier appeared in Britain’s New

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

Scientist and in Carl Sagan’s astron-
omy journal Te//us; Sagan it was who
put me in touch with Lynn Margu-
lis). The topic still burns in our
pages, and Lovelock and Margulis
are frequent contributors. The best
place to find a full discussion is in
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth,
James E. Lovelock, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1979.

Gaia is an old idea. She is one of
the four primary divine beings of the
Ancient Greeks—Chaos (Space),
Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the Abyss),
and Eros (Love). But Gaia is still a
new hypothesis, containing more
questions than answers.

In Gaia we are—all—Tangled Up
in Blue.

Stewart Brand

We would like to discuss the Earth’s atmo-
sphere from a new point of view—that it is an
integral, regulated, and necessary part of the
biosphere. In 1664 Sachs von Lewenheimb, a
champion of William Harvey, used the anal-
ogy of the circulation of water between earth
and air to illustrate the concept of the circula-
tion of blood. Apparently the idea that water
lost to the heavens is eventually returned to
Earth was so acceptable in von Lewenheimb’s
time that Harvey’s theory was strengthened by
the analogy.‘”

Three hundred and ten or so years later,
with the circulation of blood a universally ac-
cepted fact, we find it expedient to revive von
Lewenheimb’s analogy—this time to illustrate
our concept of the atmosphere as circulatory
system of the biosphere. This new way of
viewing the Earth’s atmosphere has been called
the “Gaia” hypothesis.” The term Gaia is from
the Greek for “Mother Earth,” and it implies
that certain aspects of the Earth’s atmo-
sphere—temperature, composition, oxidation
reduction state, and acidity—form a homeo-
static system, and that these properties are
themselves products of evolution. ®

From recent articles and books (e.g., refs. 5

16

and 6) one gets the impression that fluid dy-
namics, radiation chemistry, and industrial
pollution are the major factors determining the
properties of the atmosphere. The Gaia hy-
pothesis contends that biological gas exchange
processes are also major factors, especially pro-
cesses involving microorganisms. Man’s im-
pact on the atmosphere may have been overes-
timated. Man is only one of some three million
species on Earth, all of which exchange gas and
most of which exchange gas with the atmo-
sphere. Man has been around for only a few
million years while microorganisms have ex-
isted for thousands of millions of years.

It seems to us that early twentieth-century
nonmicrobiological analysis of the Earth’s
lower atmosphere will one day be considered
as ignorant as early nineteenth-century nonmi-
crobiological analysis of fermentation or dis-
ease is today.

In an excellent introduction to atmospheric
science, Goody and Walker’ say, “There is a
great difference between research in the labora-
tory and studies of the Earth and planets. In
the laboratory the scientist can perform con-
trolled experiments, each carefully designed to
answer questions of his own choosing. Except
in minor respects, however, the Earth and
planets are too large for controlled experimen-
tation. All we can do is observe what happens
naturally in terms of the laws of physics and
chemistry.”

We agree that the laws of physics and chem-
istry are basic to the understanding of atmo-
spheric phenomena but insist that the laws of
biology must be considered as well. It is our
contention that the paucity of overall under-
standing of certain aspects of the atmosphere,
especially composition and temperature, is due
to too narrow a paradigm: the idea that the at-
mosphere is an inert part of the inorganic envi-
ronment and therefore amenable to methods of
study that involve only physics and chemistry.

In this paper we explore what is perhaps a
more realistic view—that the atmosphere is a
nonliving, actively regulated part of the bio-
sphere. In our model atmospheric temperature
and composition are regulated with respect to
certain biologically critical substances: hydro-

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere

gen ions, molecular oxygen, nitrogen and its
compounds, sulfur and its compounds, and
some others, whose abundance and distribu-
tion in the atmosphere are presumed to be un-
der biological control. Biological gas exchange
processes, thought to be involved in possible
control mechanisms, are discussed elsewhere.
The purpose of this paper is simply to present
our reasons for believing the atmosphere is ac-
tively controlled.

Traditional atmospheric studies have left us
with some strange anomalies. The atmosphere
is an extremely complex blanket of gas in con-
tact with the oceans, lakes, rivers (the hydro-
sphere), and the rocky lithosphere. It has a
mass of about 5.3 X 10” grams. (The mass of
the oceans—the other major fluid on the sur-
face of the Earth—is almost a thousand times
heavier, being about 1.4 X 10” grams.) Since
the atmospheric mass corresponds to less than a
millionth of the mass of the Earth as a whole,
one would expect small changes in the compo-
sition of the solid earth to cause large changes
in the composition of the atmosphere. Yet even
in the face of a large number of potential per-
turbations, the atmosphere seems to have re-
mained dynamically constant over long periods
of time.

Many facts about the atmosphere are
known—its composition, its temperature and
pressure profiles, certain interactions with in-
coming solar radiation, and the like. Some of
these are shown in Tables 1 and 2. However, as
the efficacy of long-range weather forecasting
attests, there is no consistent model of the at-
mosphere that can be used for the purpose of
prediction.© The Earth’s atmosphere defies
simple description. From the point of view of
chemistry it sustains such remarkable disequi-
librium that Sagan “ was prompted to remark
that given the temperature, pressure, and
amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, ‘‘one can
calculate what the thermodynamic equilibrium
abundance of methane ought to be. . . . The
answer turns out to be less than 1 part in 10°.
This then is a discrepancy of at least 30 orders
of magnitude and cannot be dismissed
lightly.”

Table 2 shows that given the quantity of ox-

ygen in the atmosphere not only the major
gases such as nitrogen and methane but also
the minor atmospheric components are far
more abundant than they ought to be accord-
ing to equilibrium chemistry. Even though the
minor constituents differ greatly in relative
abundance, they sustain very large fluxes—
comparable to those of the major constituents.
The Earth’s atmosphere is certainly not at all
what one would expect from a planet interpo-
lated between Mars and Venus. It has too little
CO,, too much oxygen, and is too warm. We
believe the “Gaia” hypothesis provides the new
approach that is needed to account for these
deviations.

A new framework for scientific thought is
justified if it guarantees new observations and
experiments. The recognition that blood in
mammals circulates in a closed, regulated sys-
tem gave rise to meaningful scientific ques-
tions such as: How is blood pH kept constant?
By what mechanism is the temperature of
mammalian blood regulated around its set
point? What is the purpose of bicarbonate ion
in the blood? What is the role of fibrinogen? If
the blood were simply an inert environment (as
the atmosphere is presently viewed) such ques-
tions would seem irrelevant and never be asked
at all.

Let us consider another analogy. Bees have
been known to regulate hive temperatures dur-
ing midwinter at about 31°C, approximately
59°C above ambient (10). Under threat of des-
iccation they also maintain high humidities.
While the air in the hive is not alive, it main-
tains an enormous disequilibrium due to the
expenditure of energy by the living insects—
ultimately of course, solar energy. How is the
hive temperature maintained? How does the
architecture of the hive aid to reduce desicca-
tion? How does the behavior of the worker bees
alter temperature? These are all legitimate sci-
entific questions, generated by the circulatory
system concept.

The Gaia hypothesis of the atmosphere as a
circulatory system raises comparable and useful
scientific questions and suggests experiments
that based on the old paradigm would never be
asked, for example: How is the pH of the at-

17

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

TABLE 1. Reactive gases in the atmosphere (billions of tons/year)

How much of the gas comes from

Inorganic

W here does
Cope iio sources Biological sources the gas
Gas in parts Volcanic, Residence come from
per million etc. ? Gaian?* Human? time principally?
Nitrogen (N,) 790,000 0.001 I O 1-10 million bacteria from
years dissolved
nitrates
in soil
Oxygen (O,) 210,000 0.00016 II0 fo) 1000 years algae and
green plants,
given off in
photosynthesis
Carbon dioxide 220" "OOF 140 16 2-5 years respiration,
(CO,) combustion
Methane (CH,) i501 0 7 years fermenting bacteria
Nitrous oxide 0.3 less than 0.6 IO years bacteria and fungi
(N,O) 0.01
Carbon monox- 0.08 _ less than Teas 0.15 afewmonths from methane
ide (CO) 0.001 oxidation
(methane
from
bacteria)
Ammonia (NH,) 0.006 5 O a week bacteria and fungi
Hydrocarbons 0.001 0.2 0.2 hours green plants, industry
(CH,),
Methyl 0.00000I Oo G.O30aEO hours marine algae
iodide (CH, I)
Hydrogen ©.0000005 Oo ? ? 2 years bacteria, methane
(H,) oxidation?
Methyl O.0COO0O00000II4 O ? ? ? algae?
chloride
(CH,Cl)

*Gaian = nonhuman biological sources.

mosphere kept neutral or slightly alkaline? By
what mechanism(s) has the mean midlatitude
temperature remained constant (not deviated
more than 15°C) for the last 1000 million
years? Why are 0.5 X 10” tons nitrous oxide
(N,O) released into the atmosphere by organ-
isms? Why is about 2 X ro” tons of biogenic
methane pumped into the atmosphere each
year (representing nearly 10% of the total ter-
restrial photosynthate)? What are the absolute

18

limits on the control mechanisms, i.e., how
much perturbation (emanations of sulfur ox-
ides, chlorinated compounds, and/or carbon
monoxide; alterations in solar luminosity; and
so forth) can the atmosphere regulatory system
tolerate before all its feedback mechanisms

fail?

The Gaia approach to atmospheric homeo-
stasis has also led to a number of observations
that otherwise would not have been made, for

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere

TABLE 2. Composition of the atmosphere: gases in disequilibrium

Oxygen used
up in the Source of gas
oxidation of % contribution by
- Flux these gases biological process
(moleslyr Disequilibrium (moleslyy — Abtological
Gas Abundance % 10'7) factor x 107?) process Human Gaian*
Nitrogen 78% 3.6 igo ha LT .OOI O >99
Methane I.5 ppm 6.0 Toe 12 0.0 O 100
Hydrogen 0.5 ppm 4.4 Tou 2.2 ? fo) ?
Nitrous oxide 0.3 ppm 1.4 107 3.5 102 ° >99
Carbon monoxide 0.08 ppm 27 KOR 1A Oo! IO gO
Ammonia 0.01 ppm 8.8 167" 3.8 0.0 O° 100

*Gaian = nonanthropogenic biological sources; for details see Table 1.

? = quantities not known.
ppm = parts per million.

example, an oceanic search was undertaken for
volatile compounds containing elements that
are limiting to life on the land, and large quan-
tities of methyl iodide and dimethy] sulfide
were in fact observed."”

Given the Gaia hypothesis one deduces that
all the major biological elements (Table 3)
must either be not limiting to organisms (in
the sense that they are always readily available
in some useful chemical form) or they must be
cycled through the fluids on the surface of the
earth in time periods that are short relative to
geological processes. (Attempts to identify vol-
atile forms of these elements are in progress.)
The cycling times must be short because bio-
logical growth is based on continual cell divi-
sion that requires the doubling of cell masses
in periods of time that are generally less than
months and typically, days or hours. On life-
less planets there is no particular reason to ex-
pect this phenomenon of atmospheric cycling,
nor on the earth is it expected that gases of ele-
ments that do not enter metabolism as either
metabolites or poisons will cycle rapidly; e.g.,
based on the Gaia hypothesis, nickel, chro-
mium, strontium, rubidium, lithium, bar-
ium, and titanium will not cycle, but cobalt,
vanadium, selenium, molybdenum, iodine,
and magnesium might.“” Because biological
solutions to problems tend to be varied, redun-

dant, and complex, it is likely that all of the
mechanisms of atmospheric homeostasis will
involve complex feedback loops (see ref. 8 for
discussion). Since, for example, no volatile
form of phosphorus has ever been found in the
atmosphere, and since this element is present
in the nucleic acids of all organisms, we are
considering the possibility that the volatile
form of phosphorus at present is totally “‘bio-
logical particulate.” Figures 1 and 2 rather fan-
cifully compare the Earth’s atmosphere at pres-
ent to what it might be if life were suddenly
wiped out.

Ironically, it is the past history of the earth
with its extensive sedimentary record (fraught,
as it is, with uncertainties in interpretation)
that might provide the most convincing proof
for the existence of continued biological modu-
lation. If one accepts the current theories of
stellar evolution, the sun, being a typical star
of the main sequence, has substantially in-
creased its output of energy since the earth was
formed some 4500 million years ago. Some es-
timates for the increase in solar luminosity over
the past history of the earth are as much as
100%; most astronomers apparently accept an
increase of at least 25% over 4.5 billion
years.” Extrapolating from the current atmo-
sphere, given solar radiation output and radia-
tive surface properties of the planet, it can be

19

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

TABLE 3. Some critical biological elements that may be naturally limiting

Element

Use in biological systems

Possible form of fluid transport

MAJOR ELEMENTS

CO,; food; organic compounds in
solution; biological volatiles; carbonate,
bicarbonate, etc.; usually not limiting

N,, N,O, NO;, NO; (often limiting)
rivers, oceans, lakes

dimethyl] sulfide; dimethyl sulfoxide,
carbonyl sulfide

unknown (biological volatiles? spores?
birds? migrating salmon?)

usually not limiting except in certain

C (carbon) all organic compounds

N (nitrogen) all proteins and nucleic acids

O, H (oxygen, H,O in high concentration for all

hydrogen) organisms

S (sulfur) nearly all proteins (cysteine,
methionine, etc.); key coenzymes

P (phosphorus) all nucleic acids; adenosine triphosphate

Na, Ca, Mg, K membrane and macromolecular

(sodium, calcium, function

magnesium,

potassium)

terrestrial habitats (27)

TRACE ELEMENTS
I (iodine)
thyroxine)

Se (selenium)

limited to certain animals (e.g.,

enzymes of fermenting bacteria

methyl iodide

unknown (dimethy] selenide?)

(production of ammonia, hydrogen;

animals (26))

Mo (molybdenum)

nitrogen fixation enzymes of bacteria

unknown

and blue-green algae; carbon dioxide

reductase (Clostridium)

concluded that until about 2000 million years
ago either the atmosphere was different (e.g.,
contained more ammonia) or the earth was fro-
zen. The most likely hypothesis is that the
earth’s atmosphere contained up to about one
part in 10° ammonia, a good infrared ab-
sorber.“® Other potential ““greenhouse”’ gases
apparently will not compensate for the ex-
pected lowered temperature because they do
not have the appropriate absorption spectra or
are required in far too large quantities to be
considered reasonable.“® (There are good argu-
ments for the rapid photodestruction of any at-
mospheric ammonia."”) However, it has been
argued that ammonia is required for the origin
of life,“° and there is good evidence for the
presence of fossil microbial life in the earliest
sedimentary rocks (3400 million years ago."”)
There is no geological evidence that since the

20

beginning of the earth’s stable crust the entire
earth has ever frozen solid or that the oceans
were volatilized, suggesting that the tempera-
ture at the surface has always been maintained
between the freezing and the boiling points of
water. The fossil record suggests that from an
astronomical point of view, conditions have
been moderate enough for organisms to toler-
ate and the biosphere has been in continuous
existence for over 3000 million years.°” '® At
least during the familiar Phanerozoic (the last
600 million years of earth history for which an
extensive fossil record is available) one can ar-
gue on paleontological grounds alone that
through every era the earth has maintained
tropical temperatures at some place on the sur-
face and that the composition of the atmo-
sphere, at least with respect to molecular oxy-
gen, could not have deviated markedly. That

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere

CO2

O2 Ne

oe
H3C(CHa)g-C-GCiCHa), CHICHy),
Oo

/
CY POs

Figure 1. Earth’s atmosphere at present: examples of major volatiles. (Key: the following compounds and
spores are in the picture. It is left to the reader to identify them. See ref. 28 for many details.) Spores of:
ferns, club mosses, zygomycetes, ascomycetes, basidiomycetes, slime molds, bacteria. All contain nucleic
acids and other organic phosphates, amino acids, and so forth. Animal products: butyl mercaptan. Plant
products: myoporum, catnip (nepetalactone), eugenol, geraniol, pinene, isothiocyanate (mustard). Un-

known: PAN (paroxacety! nitrate), dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfoxide. Gases: nitrogen, oxygen, methane,

carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia.

C02

O2

Na

cOz

O02

Ne

CO2
Ne

H20

O2

Ne

co

Ne

Oz

C02

H20

Figure 2. The present atmosphere were life deleted.

21

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

is, there are no documented cases of any meta-
zoan animals (out of about 2 million species)
that can complete their life cycles in the total
absence of O,.°” All animals are composed of
cells that divide by mitosis. The mitotic cell
division itself requires O,.°° Thus it is highly
unlikely that current concentrations of oxygen
have fallen much below their present values in
some hundreds of millions of years. By impli-
cation, oxygen and the gases listed in Table 2
have been maintained at stable atmospheric
concentrations for time periods that are very
long relative to their residence times. (Resi-
dence time is the time it takes for the concen-
tration of gas to fall to 1/e or 37% its value; it
may be thought of as “turnover time.”) Fur-
thermore, since concentrations of atmospheric
oxygen only a few per cent higher than am-
bient lead to spontaneous combustion of or-
ganic matter, including grasslands and forests,
the most reasonable assumption is that the ox-
ygen value of the atmosphere has remained rel-
atively constant for quite long time periods.°”
How can these observations be consistently
reconciled? How can we explain the simultane-
ous presence of gases that are extremely reac-
tive with each other and unstable with respect
to minerals in the crust and at the same time
note that their residence times in the atmo-
sphere are very short with respect to sediment-
forming and mountain-building geological
processes? In this respect Table 3 can be in-
structive. For one can see that even though ab-
solute amounts of the gases vary over about 3
orders of magnitude, the fluxes are remarkably
similar. These gases are produced and removed
primarily by nonhuman biological processes.
(See Table 1 and ref. 8) While the processes in-
volved in atmospheric production and removal
of reactive gases are not primarily dependent
on human activity, for the most part they are
not based on animal or plant processes either
(see ref. 8 for a version of the table that lists
these). It is mainly the prokaryote microorga-
nisms that are involved in gas exchange; the
rapidly growing and dividing masters of the
microbiological world that make up in chemi-
cal complexity and metabolic virtuosity what
they lack in advanced morphology. These or-

PaPd

Figure 3. Scene from a geothermal area in Fig
Tree times (about 3400 million years ago).

ganisms presumably played a similar role in
biogeochemical processes in the past as they do
today. There is direct fossil evidence for the
continued existence of Precambrian microorga-
nisms.°” That they have an ancient history can
also be deduced from current studies of their
physiology. Among hundreds of species of
these prokaryotic microorganisms are many
obligate anaerobes, that is, organisms poisoned
by oxygen. (All organisms are poisoned by ox-
ygen at concentrations above those to which
they are adapted.) Hundreds of others are
known that are either microaerophils (adapted
to concentrations of oxygen less than ambient)
or facultative aerobes (can switch their metabo-
lism from oxygen-requiring to oxygen-
nonrequiring).

As a group, the prokaryotic microbes show
evidence that the production and release of
molecular oxygen into the atmosphere was an
extremely important environmental determi-
nant in the evolution of many genera. Prokar-
yotic microbes (in the form known as the blue-
green algae, cyanophytes) were almost cer-
tainly responsible for the original transition to
the oxygen-containing atmosphere about 2000
million years ago."”

Figures 3 and 4 present scenes before and
after the transition to oxidizing atmosphere re-
spectively. Figures 5 and 6 are reconstructions
of anaerobic cycles corresponding to Figures 3
and 4, respectively. Figure 3 attempts to re-
construct the scene as it might have looked

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere

a

Ke
]

ZS SS
IS
IIBWNG
Figure 4. Scene from a geothermal area in Gun-
flint times (about 2000 million years ago).

3400 million years ago, admittedly in a rather
geothermal area. Although no free oxygen
(above that produced by photochemical pro-
cesses and hydrogen loss) is available in the at-
mosphere the scene is teeming with life—mi-

crobial life. For example, entire metabolic
processes, as shown in Figure 5, are available
within the group of anaerobic prokaryotic mi-
crobes today. Since at the higher taxonomic
levels (kingdoms and phyla) once successful
patterns evolve they tend not to become ex-
tinct,°” it is likely that ancestors of present-
day microbes were available to interact with
atmospheric gases very early on the primitive
earth. Certainly life was very advanced meta-
bolically by the time the stromatolitic rocks
were deposited. With the evolution of oxygen-
releasing metabolism by blue-green algae came
the stromatolites. These layered sediments are
extremely common, especially in the late Pre-
cambrian.°” With the stromatolites come
other Precambrian evidence for the transition
to the oxidizing atmosphere. By the middle
Precambrian, about 2000 million years ago—
the time at which the stromatolites and micro-
fossils become increasingly abundant °* *”—

?
N H S p>
yd BORK WD
gs AMMonn ® CREF ARBoy ro
we MONO, YY sure
nit Sarcina E DE
Clostridium Methanococcus
photosynthetic CH and others (exe) —
a. NH; He ane SCO
A
Ne2 | I ] a Hes _
neorly all volatile amines from breakdown hy
organisms and organic acids hv of porphyrins
lactic acid bacteria
Eubocterium
Clostridium V photosynthetic bacteria,
: green sulfur bocterio,
| | ee |S CO3- purple sulfur bacteria
ee +Ho
ee CaS04q4 |
Fe pyrimides th Seniesa ee
| amino acids Coco; +3H,0+ ge
Pt Micrococcus photosynthetic photosynthetic Rceipitate S04 Ss
| lactic ocid bocteria, mixed bacteria
| bacteria, and acid and butylene Clostridio 3CO+H20+4+5S
others glycol fermenters LIMESTONES H2SO4 ae
AG° 298 = ae
cc an | a IRON SULFIDES

ee

nucleic acids, cystetic acid

proteins of proteins 1 eesti
[CH20]n

\° REDUCED CARBON OF CELLS /

Figure 5. A reconstruction of possible anaerobic cycles: 3400 million years ago (genera of microorganisms
catalizing the reactions are underlined).

23

Lynn Margulis and James E. Lovelock

?
‘das N 0 C S
co Ho
. atmospheric
sSGEN photodissociotion
ONIA Ny NI THANE pi CARBON
y ROY, EN -
\ NIT Ox\D
Bocillus
ee —— <€oligocarbo-
aaa 02 = CO2 phitus NS Ba
H
Nilkcsomones HoOROo atmos Se O2 TRigbor| Caan cena
Rrotobacter Op + CH ae Methonococcus aS 4 Gis
9 oxidizing Clostridium + Ho and others co
ae) Oxidr7z
becteric eee NH3 me “\ CO»
volatile Oo from breakdown (ee
N amines ond of porphyrins
N20 sche orgonic f loctic acid bacterio O02 Mycobacterium
CO2 : acids ) + Nocordio
i Eubocterium Methone teins dl S-CH3 Ho S Pseudomonos
denitritying Clostridium Hydrogen | Lo. |= eel "|
pacterig Ammonia a (saat green sulfur bacteria
rd be a sulfur bocterio
CoCO3 Dessitovbnor
Micrococcus photosyr:thetic + O2
O2 a" lactic acid bacteria, photosynthetic $0. gee 2S O2
+ ( =— bocterio, ond fermenters pla bocterio a5 +
Fe(OH3) others GR Clostridia CHe
[LIMESTONES] oxidizing Ppt
FeCOs” 5 NOo- “ip cxciing
NO3- MANY OXIDIZED
RED BEDS =< MINERALS
nucleic acids, cystetic oN
proteins of proteins

ae ia CARBON OF s

Figure 6. A reconstruction of possible microbial aerobic cycles: 2000 million years ago.

the scene might have looked like that in Figure
4. The metabolic processes accompanying

that scene are shown in Figure 6. It is obvious
that from among metabolic processes in pro-
karyotic microbes alone there are many that
involve the exchange of atmospheric gases.
This figure shows how oxygen-handling me-
tabolism was essentially superimposed on an
anaerobic world, a concept that is consistent
with the observation that reaction with mo-
lecular oxygen tends to be the final step in
aerobic respiratory processes. All of the pro-
cesses shown in Figures 5 and 6 are known
from current microorganisms (and, by defini-
tion, those that haven’t become extinct are evo-
lutionarily successful).

The fossil evidence, taken together, suggests
that the earth’s troposphere has maintained re-
markable constancy in the face of several enor-
mous potential perturbations: at least the in-
crease in solar luminosity and the transition to
the oxidizing atmosphere. The earth’s atmo-
sphere maintains chemical disequilibria of

24

many orders of magnitude containing rapidly
turning-over gases produced in prodigious
quantities. The temperature and composition
seem to be set at values that are optimal for
most of the biosphere. Furthermore, the bio-
sphere has many potential methods for altering
the temperature and composition of the atmo-
sphere.“ The biosphere has probably had these
methods available almost since its inception
more than 3000 million years ago. Is it not
reasonable to assume that the lower atmo-
sphere is maintained at an optimum by homeo-
stasis and that this maintenance (at the ulti-
mate expense of solar energy, of course) is
performed by the party with the vested inter-
est: the biosphere itself?

REFERENCES

1. W. Pagel, 1951. Isis 42:23. Pagel quotes Harvey
himself as saying: “I began to think whether there might
not be a motion as it were in a circle. Now this I after-
wards found to be true; . . . which motion we may be al-
lowed to call circular, in the same way as Aristotle says
that the air and the rain emulate the circular motion of

The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere

the superior bodies; for the moist earth, warmed by the
sun evaporates; the vapours drawn upwards are con-
densed, and descending in the form of rain moisten the
earth again; and by this arrangement are generations of
living things produced. . . . And so in all likelihood,
does it come to pass in the body, through the motion of
the blood; the various parts are nourished, cherished,
quickened by the warmer more perfect vaporous spiri-
tous, and, as I may say, alimentive blood; which, on the
contrary, in contact with these parts becomes cooled, co-
agulated, and, so to speak, effete; whence it returns to its
sovereign, the heart, as if to its source, or to the inmost
home of the body, there to recover its state of excellence
of perfection.”

2. J. E. Lovelock, 1972. Gaia as seen through the at-
mosphere. Atmospheric Environment 6: 579-580.

3. J. E. Lovelock and L. Margulis, 1974. Atmospheric
homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothe-
sis. Tellus 26: 1-10.

4. J. E. Lovelock and L. Margulis, 1974. Homeostatic
tendencies of the Earth’s atmosphere. Origins of Life
I: 12-22.

5. I. Rasool, Ed. 1974. The Lower Atmosphere. New
York: Plenum Press.

6. W. W. Kellogg and S. H. Schneider, 1974. Climate
stabilization: for better or for worse? Science 186:
1163-1172.

7. R. Goody and J.C. G. Walker, 1972. Atmo-
spheres. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

8. L. Margulis and J. E. Lovelock, 1974. Biological
modulation of the Earth’s atmosphere, Icarus 21:
471-489.

g. C. Sagan, 1970. Planets and Explorations. Condon
Lectures, Eugene: Oregon State System.

10. E.O. Wilson, 1970. The Insect Societies, Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

11. J. E. Lovelock, R. J. Maggs, and R. A. Rasmus-
sen, 1972. Atmospheric dimethy] sulfide and the natural
sulfur cycle. Nature 237: 452-453.

12. F Egami, 1974. Minor elements and evolution.
Journal of Molecular Evolution 4: 113-120.

13. L. Oster, 1973. Modern Astronomy. San Fran-
cisco: Holden Day, Inc.

14. C. Sagan and G. Mullen, 1972. Earth and Mars:
Evolution of atmosphere and surface temperatures. Sci-
ence 177: 52-56.

15. J. Ferris and L. Nicodem, 1974, pp. 107-117 in
Origins of Life and Evolutionary Biochemistry, K. Dose,

S. W. Fox, C. A. Deborin, and T. E. Pavlovskaya, eds.
New York: Plenum Press.

16. J. L. Badaand S. L. Miller, 1968. Ammonium ion
concentration in the primitive ocean. Science 159:
423-425.

17. E.S. Barghoorn, 1971. The oldest fossils. Scien-
tific American 224: 30-42; E. S. Barghoorn and J. W.
Schopf, 1966. Microorganisms three billion years old
from the Precambrian of South Africa. Science 152:
758-763.

18. P. E. Cloud, Jr., 1968. Atmospheric and hydro-
spheric evolution on the primitive earth. Science 160:
729-736.

19. J. Augenfeld, 1974. Personal communication.
20. J. E. Amoore, 1961. Dependence of mitosis and
respiration in roots upon oxygen tension. Proceedings of

the Royal Society, B 154: 109-129.

21. J. E. Lovelock and J. P. Lodge, 1972. Oxygen in
the contemporary atmosphere. Atmospheric Environ-
ment 6: 575-578.

22. G. G. Simpson, 1960, in Evolution after Darwin,
S. Tax, Ed. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago
Press, Vol.1; pp. 177-180.

23. S.M. Awramik, 1973. Stromatolites of the Gun-
flint Iron Formation. Ph.D. Thesis Harvard University
Department of Geology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

24. E. S. Barghoorn and S. A. Tyler, 1965. Microorga-
nisms from the Gunflint Chert. Science 147: 563-577.

25. J. W. Schopf, 1970. Precambrian microorganisms
and evolutionary events prior to the origin of vascular
plants. Biological Review 45: 319-352.

26. T. Stadtman, 1974. Selenium biochemistry. Sci-
ence 183, 915—922.

27. D.B. Botkin, P. A. Jordan, S. A. Dominski,

H. D. Lowendorf, and G. E. Hutchinson, 1973. Sodium
dynamics in a northern ecosystem. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
70: 2745-2748.

28. P.H. Gregory, 1973. Microbiology of the Atmo-
sphere. 2nd ed. John Wiley & Sons. New York &
Toronto.

I'D PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE

CQ introduced me to the concept of Gaia. Has
anyone thought about a flag for Gaia?

Stephen Hodgkin

Hughes, Australia

{Spring 1983}

25

A Conversation with

GREGORY BATESON
MARGARET MEAD

For God's Sake,
Margaret

It gives me glee to read this interview
again. (We originally published it in
Summer 1976.) I have never heard
such high quality and sheer intellec-
tual yield in argument. Fora good
look at what it was like to grow up in
the Bateson-Mead family, see Mary
Catherine Bateson’s With a Daugh-
ter’s Eye (Morrow, 1984). Mary Cath-
erine’s account of her father’s death is
in this book in your hand, p. 170.
Gregory taught me to stop obsess-
ing on things and focus on the rela-
tions between them—to focus on
pattern, the bigger and blurrier, the
more challenging and potentially re-
vealing. Doing that became one of
the tasks of COEVOLUTION. I dedi-
cated the Next Whole Earth Catalog:
“To Gregory Bateson, 1904-1980.
A pioneer in anthropology, psychol-
ogy, cybernetics and epistemology,
he always called himself a biologist.
If I could count on Gregory’s com-
pany in heaven, and I could get to
heaven by being good, I’d be good.”

26

Likewise Margaret, though she’d
have the angels organized and doing
cultural exchanges with hell by now,
and St. Peter would be writing snitty
articles about her early work in Sa-
moa, and God would finally admit to
being a Lesbian, self-fecund. I miss
them both. Margaret died shortly
before Gregory. This interview took
place at Gregory’s home near Santa
Cruz, California, in 1976, when he
was seventy-two and she was sev-
enty-six.

They married in 1936. They had
met and fallen in love in 1932 while
both were doing anthropological
fieldwork on the Sepik River in New
Guinea (At the time, Margaret was
with her second husband, Reo For-
tune). In New Guinea, Gregory’s
unusual sense of theory met Margar-
et’s improved field methodology and
sparked much of the quality in
Gregory’s opus on the Iatmul tribe,
Naven.

Newly wed in Bali, they spent
two collaborative years in the most
intense and productive fieldwork of
their lives, developing, among other
things, a still-unmatched photo-
graphic analysis of the culture.

Their daughter Mary Catherine,
Margaret’s only child, was born in
1939 in the United States. Gregory
and Margaret worked together on
the result of their Bali fieldwork,
Balinese Character—A Photographic
Analysis, and then were separated in-
creasingly by World War II and their
own diverging interests.

For God’s Sake, Margaret

After the war they were both in-
volved in starting the somewhat fa-
mous Macy Conferences (1947-53)
that invented cybernetics. This in-
terview begins with their joint recol-
lection of that critical period.

Margaret Mead was one of the
world’s most remarkable women.
She got a full mixture of praise and
notoriety (notorious in that day be-
cause women weren't supposed to
talk about sex) with her first book,
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Since
then, there have been ten other
books and numerous honors and po-
sitions, including President of the
American Anthropological Associa-
tion (1960), and of Scientists’ Insti-
tute for Public Information, and (in
1976) the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, and a
Curator of the American Museum of
Natural History, which was her
headquarters. In public affairs, for a
while, she seemed to have taken over
the Eleanor Roosevelt niche.

After Bali and the Macy Confer-
ences, Gregory Bateson went on to
work with schizophrenics, alcohol-
ics, artists, dolphins, students, and a
steadily more general set of under-
standings of what they have in com-
mon. He coauthored a book, Commu-
nication: The Social Matrix of Psychi-
atry (Norton, 1951-68) with Jurgen
Ruesch, and edited Perceval’s Narra-
tive—A Patient’s Account of His Psy-
chosis, 1830-1832 (Stanford, 1961).
Daughter Mary Catherine wrote a
book about one of Gregory’s confer-
ences, Our Own Metaphor (Knopf,
1972). His collected papers appear
in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Ballan-
tine, 1972) which is the book that
got me. Later I was able to partici-
pate in the making of his summation
work, Mind and Nature: A Necessary
Unity (Bantam, 1979) by granting
$8,000 from Point Foundation for

Mary Catherine to come over from
Iran and help with the book while
Gregory recovered from surgery. In
1985 she has been assembling a post-
humous Gregory Bateson work, An-
gels Fear, on religion.

Stewart Brand

STEWART BRAND: I need a little background,
if it’s all right, on how this whole Macy thing
got rolling, why, and when, and what the se-
quence was.

GREGORY BATESON: There was this Macy
meeting in what, 42?'

sB: Who started it, and what was it about?

BATESON: This was a meeting called “Cere-
bral Inhibition,” which in fact was a meeting
on hypnosis.* “Cerebral inhibition” was a re-
spectable word for hypnosis. Most of what was
said about “feedback” was said over lunch.

MEAD: Well, I know that’s what you always
tell people, but I didn’t sit at the same place at
lunch, and J heard what was said at that con-
ference. But at that conference, which is the
one where Milton Erickson hypnotized that
Yale psychologist, it was at the end of that
conference that you really had the design of
what needed to be done. And then you were
caught up in war work and went overseas and
there was that long period.

I think that you actually have to go back to
that earlier meeting that was held in the base-
ment of the old Psycho-Analytic building on
the West Side the day of Pearl Harbor.

BATESON: They didn’t on-go from year to
year, those early ones. Larry Frank was chair-
man I bet.

MEAD: No, Larry never was chairman, you
know. He always sat on the sidelines and made
somebody else be chairman. Kubie was a very
important person at that point.

BATESON: Yes. Kubie was an important

* The twenty participants included representatives of an-
thropology, psychobiology, physiology, psychiatry, neu-
rology, psychology, medicine, anatomy, and electronics.
Among those present were Gregory Bateson, Lawrence
K. Frank, Frank Fremont-Smith, Lawrence Kubie, War-
ren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Arthur Rosenblueth.

27

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

bridge because Kubie had respectable-ized
Milton. There’s a whole series of papers which
are jointly Kubie and Erickson. Now, in fact,
they were Erickson’s papers.

MEAD: And Kubie didn’t know what was in
them. That’s the truth.

BATESON: But Kubie did get right the en-
ergy problem. He was the first person that
really took Freud’s “energy” and said, “Look,
look, look, it makes no sense.” There is a very
good paper by Kubie on the errors of Freudian
energy theory. {Goes to find the reference.} Huh.
Kubie, ‘‘Fallacious Use of Quantitative Con-
cepts in Dynamic Psychology.”

MEAD: Now when was that?

BATESON: That was. . . guess.

MEAD: No, I don’t guess that one.

BATESON: Published in 47. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly. For which I suspect he very nearly
got read out of the church. He never said it
again.

MEAD: It was very hard to read Kubie out of
the church because he had once been a neurolo-
gist, and that was the thing that they were all

scared of. Now, where is the Rosenblueth,
Wiener, and Bigelow paper? The first great pa-
per on cybernetics. *

BATESON: Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bige-
low. “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Phz-
losophy of Science, 1943.”

MEAD: That’s it, you see.

BATESON: It could just have been pub-
lished at the time of the Cerebral Inhibition
conference.

MEAD: It was just coming out or just had
come out.

SB: What was the experiment that that pa-
per recorded?

BATESON: It didn’t record an experiment,
it reported on the formal character of seeking
mechanisms, essentially. Self-corrective mech-
anisms such as missiles. The missile measures
the angle between its direction and the target
it’s seeking, and uses that measure to correct
itself.

*T am told a paper by W. Ross Ashby predated this by a
year but we didn’t know it.—Mead

puvsg

Gregory, Margaret, and a microphone at the Bateson home near Santa Cruz.

28

For God’s Sake, Margaret

MEAD: But using some very simple physio-
logical experiments that Rosenblueth had been
doing at the University of Mexico.

SB: Do you recall what they were saying that
you overheard that got you excited?

BATESON: It was a solution to the problem
of purpose. From Aristotle on, the final cause
has always been the mystery. This came out
then. We didn’t realize then (at least I didn’t
realize it, though McCulloch might have) that
the whole of logic would have to be recon-
structed for recursiveness. When I came in
from overseas in forty-five I went within the
first two or three days to Frank Fremont-
Smith, and said, “Let’s have a Macy Confer-
ence on that stuff.”

MEAD: You and Warren McCulloch had an
exchange of letters when you were in Ceylon.

BATESON: We did?

MEAD: Yes. You told me enough about it in
some way. I talked to Fremont-Smith. Mc-
Culloch had talked to Fremont-Smith.

BATESON: Fremont-Smith told me, “Yes,
we've just arranged to have one, McCulloch is
the chairman, go talk to McCulloch.”

MEAD: And McCulloch had a grand design
in his mind. He got people into that confer-
ence, who he then kept from talking.

BATESON: Yes, he had a design on how the
shape of the conversation would run over five
years—what had to be said before what else
could be said.

MEAD: He wouldn’t let Ralph Gerard talk.
He said, “You can talk next year.” He was very
autocratic.

BATESON: Yes, but an awfully good chair-
man in many ways. It’s very rare to have a
chairman who knows what it’s about at all.

SB: What was his grand design?

BATESON: Who knows?

MEAD: Well, I think more or less what hap-
pened was.

BATESON: How did the first meeting differ
from the second meeting?

MEAD: There wasn’t even any usable termi-
nology. At first we called the thing ‘‘feed-
back,” and the models that we were presented
with at that point were the guided missile, tar-

get-seeking. Now there had been another event
that’s worth considering here. That is that
Wiener had written an article in the A¢/antic,
or Harper's, refusing to give the war depart-
ment data on guided missiles. Remember
that?

BATESON: Oh yes.

MEAD: He’d worked on them all through
the war, and of course they had the material if
they had hunted for it, but they made the mis-
take of asking him for some, and at that point
he said that he would not give it to them, the
war was over, and this was data that could only
be used for war-like purposes. He would not
give it to them.

BATESON: That’s right, it was the Ad¢/antic.

MEAD: They were talking almost entirely of
negative feedback. By this time, Wiener and
Bigelow and Johnny Von Neumann of course,
were members of the group, and Rosenblueth,
Kurt Lewin, Molly Harrower, Evelyn Hutch-
inson, Leonard Savage, Henry Brosin and that
Hungarian who always knew who was sleeping
with who and it was the only thing he was in-
terested in, I’ve forgotten his name. Well, the
lists survive all right.

There were three groups of people. There
were the mathematicians and physicists—peo-
ple trained in the physical sciences, who were
very, very precise in what they wanted to think
about. There was a small group of us, anthro-
pologists and psychiatrists, who were trained
to know enough about psychology in groups so
we knew what was happening, could use it,
and disallow it. And then there were two or
three gossips in the middle, who were simply
people who had a lot of loose intuition and no
discipline to what they were doing. In a sense
it was the most interesting conference I’ve ever
been in, because nobody knew how to manage
these things yet.

SB: So you had one group of people that was
on to another group on a level they were not
used to.

MEAD: Yes, and shifting back and forth
between these levels and keeping everything
straight was very interesting. So we used the
model, “feedback,” and Kurt Lewin—who

29

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

1952, one of the later Macy Conferences on cybernetics. From foreground clockwise: Larry Kubie, Larry
Frank, T. C. Schneirla, H. L. Teuber, Walter Pitts, Gerhard von Bonin, Frank Fremont-Smith, Warren
McCulloch (beard), W. Grey Walter, Henry Quastler, Heinz Von Foerster, John Bowman.

didn’t understand any known language, but al-
ways had to reduce them to concepts—he went
away with the idea of feedback as something
that when you did anything with a group you
went back and told them later what had hap-
pened. And he died before anything much else
happened. So the word “feedback” got intro-
duced incorrectly into the international
UNESCO type conferences where it’s been
ever since.

BATESON: In the small group cult, feedback
now means either telling people what they did,
or answering.

MEAD: Yes. “I don’t get any feedback from
you,’ or “I can’t go on with this without some
feedback.” It wouldn’t have survived if Kurt
had lived. He would undoubtedly have got it
right.

SB: I would like a little more detail back at
the initial time when you knew you had hit
something.

BATESON: We knew we had, well, for me,

I had analyzed the Jatmul of Sepik River in
Naven’ and I had analyzed out the fact there
were interactions which must stockpile.

SB: This was your schismogenesis?

BATESON: This is schismogenesis, yes. We
named it in ’36.

MEAD: It hadn’t been named yet. You're

40

starting back before you named it schis-
mogenesis.

BATESON: Well, Naven was published. I’m
talking about the state I was in when this stuff
appeared.

MEAD: In 43.

BATESON: Yes. The next thing that followed
that was “Generalized Foreign Policies.” L. F.
Richardson.* I went back to England in 39.
Hitler had invaded Poland. Bartlett said, “You
might be interested in that,” throwing it across
the room in contempt.

MEAD: I’m glad I have another count against
Bartlett. I didn’t know he had contempt for
Richardson.

BATESON: For Richardson and for me, you
see. It was contemptible that I would be inter-
ested in the contemptible. So I ran off with
that and kept it (probably it’s Bartlett’s copy of
his files that we now have), and brought it back
to this country.

SB: What was in that paper?

BATESON: This is the mathematics of arma-
ments races. How do you build the mathemat-
ics of a system in which what I do depends
upon what you do, and what you do depends
upon what I do, and we get into a thing. Rich-
ardson set a limit by invoking “fatigue.” He
started with a simple pair of differential equa-

For God’s Sake, Margaret

tions in the premise that my rate of armament
could be a linear function of your strength, and
vice versa. That led immediately to an exponen-
tial runaway. He added a “‘fatigue’”’ factor rep-
resenting the drain on your and my resources.
The question then was whether the system
could settle. Are we going to settle at a mutual

. . there’s a word in international relations
for slapping the other people’s aggression back
by threat. .

MEAD: You mean deterrence?

BATESON: Yes, mutual deterrence. That
word hadn’t been invented then. Then in the
appendix, he had some revised equations in
terms of not what is your strength and what is
my strength, but what is the difference be-
tween our strengths. He worked it out in
terms of the relation of two nations where each
is stimulated by the amount the other side is
ahead. This was obviously symmetrical—lIat-
mul Sepik River schismogenesis—right?

I then wrote to him at that stage, and said,
“What about the other case, where you are
stimulated to aggression by the weakness of the
other side?” Which is the complementary
schismogenesis, right? He worked out the al-
gebra for that, and said, “It’s very unpromis-
ing. I don’t recommend nations to get into
that at all. The orders of instability they get
into are then very serious.”

SB: Because that one would accelerate the
difference rather than reduce the difference?

BATESON: Accelerates the difference, yes.

sB: A large amount of this strikes me as
being the war. Would cybernetics have begun
without the war? Richardson’s armaments
race, and Wiener’s missiles. . .

BATESON: Wiener without a biologist
wouldn’t have done it.

MEAD: Wiener was working on Rosen-
blueth’s stuff. Now Richardson is a very pecu-
liar character. He was a Quaker schoolteacher
of mathematics. He did all the basic work on
weather prediction. It was used in World War
II and he was never told how it worked, be-
cause of security. He died without knowing
about it.

BATESON: Richardson was responding to

World War I. As a Quaker he refused to bear
arms in World War I, and he became an am-
bulance man. He sat in the trenches waiting
for the next call for the ambulance working
out the mathematics of armaments races. Be-
cause he was sure that if only this could be got
straight, the whole mess wouldn’t have to hap-
pen, which indeed might be true.

MEAD: Now, there were some other things
like this that were being talked about, and one
was what was called a vicious circle. Milton
Erickson had written a paper on a girl who
quarreled and had headaches and got alienated
from people, which led to further quarrels, and
so on.

BATESON: Yes, all the positive feedback stuff
was ready. And that presented the problem:
why don’t these systems blow their tops? And
the moment they came out with negative feed-
back, then one was able to say why they don’t
blow their tops.

SB: This was a word and an idea you heard
about in 43?

BATESON: That’s when negative feedback
came in.

MEAD: We had things about reversals of
signi.”

BATESON: That was another story, that’s
before Richardson, even, and way before feed-
back. Already in Naven there is a statement
that complementary schismogenesis neutral-
izes symmetrical, and vice versa. If you get
into too long a contrast between the bosses and
the workers (which is complementary schismo-
genesis), you put them all out on the cricket
field and make them play cricket, which puts
them in a symmetrical situation. And it
doesn’t matter who wins the game of cricket,
you know.

sB: As long as they’re in that mode. . .

BATESON: Or if they’re too far in symmetri-
cal rivalry, such as a quarreling husband and
wife, when one of them sprains his ankle, in
comes the complementary with dependency.
They suddenly feel much better.

SB: It doesn’t matter who sprains?

BATESON: It doesn’t matter who sprains his
ankle, of course not.

41

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

dha

pre

At the 1952 Macy Conference. From foreground clockwise: Henry Quastler, Heinz Von Foerster, John
Bowman, Gregory Bateson, G. E. Hutchinson, unidentified, Henry Brosin, Heinrich Kliiver, Janet
Freud, Y. Bar-Hillel (speaking), Julian Bigelow, Leonard Savage, V. E. Amassian, Margaret Mead, Y. R.
Chao, F. S. Northrup, Don Marquis, Larry Kubie.

SB: So you had some notion that all of these
various pathologies were structurally the same?

BATESON: No, structurally related, that
there was a subject matter of inquiry defined
by all these. You see, the fantastic thing is that
in 1856, before the publication of the Origin
of Species, Wallace in Ternate, Indonesia, had
a psychedelic spell following his malaria in
which he invented the principle of natural
selection. He wrote to Darwin and he said,
“Look, natural selection is just like a steam
engine with a governor.” The first cybernetic
model. But he only thought he had an illustra-
tion, he didn’t think he’d really said probably
the most powerful thing that’d been said in the
nineteenth century.

MEAD: Only nobody knew it.

BATESON: Nobody knew it. And there it is,
still in the text. Nobody picked it up. Well,
there was the machinery, the governor itself.
There was the mathematics of the machine
with the governor, which was done by Clerk
Maxwell in 1868, because nobody knew how
to write a blueprint for these bloody things—
they would go into oscillation. Then there’s
Claude Bernard about 1890 with the mz/zeu in-
terne—the internal matrix of the body, control
of temperature, control of sugar, and all that.’

SB: Which later became homeostasis?

42

BATESON: Which later became homeostasis
in Cannon.° But nobody put the stuff together
to say these are the formal relations which go
for natural selection, which go for internal
physiology, which go for me picking up the
salt cellar. This was really done by Wiener, and
Rosenblueth and McCulloch and Bigelow. And
who really put the truth through, I don’t
know, do you?

MEAD: No. Wiener and McCulloch were
first partners in this thinking, and then be-
came rivals when McCulloch went to MIT. As
long as McCulloch stayed at Illinois and Wie-
ner at MIT they were working right together.
With both of them at MIT they became totally
alienated, and then Walter Pitts got involved.
He was the youngest member of the group.

BATESON: Oh God, he was so clever. You’d
set him a problem, you know, and he would
reach up to his hair and take a couple of
strands, and he would say, “Well, now, if you
say that, you see, um, no then, you see,” and
he’d work it all out with his hair.

MEAD: He was a very odd boy. Now, one of
the important points at this stage was one that
Gregory kept making, that a possible cross-
disciplinary mathematical language was avail-
able. We never got very far with that because
all you could ever get out of people like Wie-

For God’s Sake, Margaret

ner was, “You need a longer run.”’ We used to
drive them absolutely out of their minds be-
cause they were not willing to look at pattern,
really. What they wanted was a terribly long
run of data.

BATESON: Of quantitative data, essentially.

MEAD: Quantitative data, and we never got
them really to look at the problem of pattern.
Von Neumann came the closest to it.

BATESON: Yes, he was in games theory, you
see.

SB: How many of you were thinking you
had some kind of a general solution?

MEAD: Gregory thought so, and Larry Frank
thought so, Evelyn Hutchinson; we had Ross
Ashby over, how about Savage?

BATESON: I don’t think so, no. You see, one
of the essentials, Stewart, for understanding it,
was to have been brought up in the age when it
wasn't there, when purpose was a total mys-
tery. Naven is a disciplined book, written
without teleology. The rule was you must not
invoke teleology. Now, people like Savage,
who was a mathematician, for one thing he
never faced biological data, you see. He didn’t
know what a mystery it is that you have a nose
between two eyes, and you don’t have noses on
the outside here, you know. All that sort of
mystery wasn’t a question for him. Now, if you
say to somebody like that, ““Why is the trunk
of an elephant a nose?” they can’t tell you
without an awful sweat that it’s because it’s be-
tween two eyes. The formal puzzle has never
been presented to them.

MEAD: I remember Robert Merton saying
once that there wasn’t a person in the country
who was thinking hard about problems who
didn’t have a folder somewhere marked some-
thing like ‘circular systems.” Horney’s book
The Neurotic Personality of Our Times’ discusses
the vicious circle, and interventions in the cir-
cle, and the effect of intervention. Milton’s pa-
per on that girl with migraine headaches and
quarreling with her friends, there was lots of
stuff around. . .

BATESON: On positive feedback.

MEAD: But also about possible intervention.

BATESON: But the essence of the other thing
is that it’s not an intervention.

MEAD: Yes, but intervention is a precursor
of thinking of... .

BATESON: Yes, yes. All cybernetic entities
are displaced small boys.

MEAD: Displaced small what?

BATESON: Boys. They’re jacks. You know
what a jack is? A jack is an instrument to dis-
place a small boy. A bootjack is a thing for
pulling off boots ‘cause you haven’t a small boy
to pull it off for you.

MEAD: I'l] remember that next time. This is
an English joke that no one will understand.

BATESON: I can’t help it. On the first steam
engines, you've got a pair of cylinders and
you've got valves, and you pull this valve to
run the steam into this one, close it, let it drive
the piston, pull it—this is done by hand.
Then they invented the idea of having the fly-
wheel control the valves. This displaced a
small boy.

SB: The governor displaced another one?

BATESON: And the governor displaced an-
other small boy, who was to keep the engine
going at a constant rate, that’s right. Now
then, the John Stroud stuff is the study of the
psychology of the human being between two
machines.

In any device such as an ack-ack gun you’ve
got a whole series of small boys in the situation
of being between a machine and another ma-
chine. What John Stroud worked on was the
psychology of that situation. He found what I
still think are some very interesting things,
namely that the orders of equations (you know,
equations in X, or X’, or X°, or whatever) are
discontinuous in the human mind, as well as
being discontinuous in mathematical paper
work. Where is John Stroud now, do you ever
see him?

MEAD: He is retired, teaching at Simon
Fraser somewhat, and he’s been brought back
by Gerry O'Neill into discussions of space
colonies.

SB: Good lord.

MEAD: He was very much interested in
space colonies. He told me all about them
twenty-five years ago, and I was interested in
all the problems then, the selection of people,
and what not.

33

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

BATESON: Stewart, you should get hold of
John Stroud.

MEAD: Now Gerry has John Stroud’s manu-
script and he’s not going to read it until he’s
finished his own. I said, “I think that’s un-
scientific and childish.”

BATESON: He wants credit for inventing
anything that John Stroud had invented.

MEAD: Well, he did invent it separately,
that’s true, and he wants to prove it, because
after all, what does a physical science have in
the world except priority? I don’t blame them
you know, because they haven’t got anything
else. All they’re interested in is priority. They
spend weeks and months discussing priority.
It’s so boring. Somebody mailed a letter three
days before somebody else did, and they have a
whole meeting about it.

SB: Margaret, what was your perception at
the time of the early Macy meetings as to what
was going on?

MEAD: The thing that cybernetics made the
most difference to me, aside from all the things
that you know, in the social organization field,
was the interaction between the mother and
child. There had been too much emphasis that
there were temperamental differences among
children, so that you responded differently toa
hyperactive baby than you did to a quiet baby.
But the extent to which there was a system in
which the mother was dependent on what the
child had learned as the stimulus for the next
position wasn’t well articulated until we got
the cybernetics conferences going.

BATESON: The link-up with the behavioral
sciences spread very slowly and hasn’t really
spread yet. The cyberneticians in the narrow
sense of the word went off into input-output.

SB: They went off into computer science.

BATESON: Computer science is input-out-
put. You’ve got a box, and you've got this line
enclosing the box, and the science is the sci-
ence of these boxes. Now, the essence of Wie-
net’s cybernetics was that the science is the sci-
ence of the whole circuit. You see, the diagram

MEAD: You'd better verbalize this diagram if
it’s going to be on the tape.
BATESON: Well, you can carry a piece of yel-

34

Input Output

Engineer

Fees |

Feed Y~__Feedbak

Wiener, Bateson, Mead

low paper all the way home with you. The
electric boys have a circuit like that, and an
event here is reported by a sense organ of some
kind, and affects something that puts in here.
Then you now cut off there and there, then you
say there’s an input and an output. Then you
work on the box. What Wiener says is that you
work on the whole picture and its properties.
Now, there may be boxes inside here, like this,
of all sorts, but essentially your ecosystem,
your organism-plus-environment, is to be con-
sidered as a single circuit.

SB: The bigger circle there. . .

BATESON: And you're not really concerned
with an input-output, but with the events
within the bigger circuit, and you are part of
the bigger circuit. It’s these lines around the
box (which are just conceptual lines after all)
which mark the difference between the engi-
neersand.. .

MEAD: . . . and between the systems people
and general systems theory, too.

BATESON: Yes.

sB: A kind of a Martin Buber-ish break-
down, “I-it,”” where they are trying to keep
themselves out of that which they’re studying.
The engineer is outside the box. . . and Wie-
ner is inside the box.

BATESON: And Wiener is inside the box;
I’m inside the box. . .

MEAD: I’m inside the box. you see, Wiener
named the thing, and of course the word “‘cy-
bernetics” comes from the Greek word for
helmsman.

BATESON: It actually existed as a word be-
fore Wiener—it’s a nineteenth-century word.

For God’s Sake, Margaret

MEAD: Yes, but he wrote the book Cyder-
netics* and sort of patented the idea to that ex-
tent. And then he went to Russia, and was
very very well received. The Russians were
crazy about this right away—it fit right into
their lives. But one of the big difficulties in
Russian psychology is that they have great dif-
ficulty learning that anything’s irreversible. So
cybernetics spread all over the Soviet Union
very rapidly, and in Czechoslovakia, whereas
what spread here was systems theory instead of
cybernetics.

sB: How did that happen? It seems like
something went kind of awry.

MEAD: Americans like mechanical
machines.

BATESON: They like tools.

SB: Material tools more than conceptual
tools.

BATESON: No, because conceptual tools
aren't conceptual tools in America, they're not
part of you.

SB: How about McCulloch? He loved ma-
chinery. Did he also see himself as inside the
box?

MEAD: Well, one of the things he spent a
great deal of time on was perception machines,
separate sensory apparatus for the deaf or the
blind.

(After reminiscence about other meetings following
the Macy period the subject of ‘feed forward” comes
up.)

BATESON: As far as I was ever able to make
out, ‘feed forward” was implicit and more or
less explicit in the original Wiener paper. The
feed forward process is what you get by using
not the primary variable, but the derivative of
the variable. You’ve got a machine for steering
a ship, an automatic steerer, and you set her
loose in the Atlantic, and you want her to go to
London or some such place: she’s to sail east.
You have a compass card, and you measure the
error between the compass card and the direc-
tion the ship’s pointing, and you use that angle
to control the steering machine, which pulls a
rudder this way and that, right? Depending on
the error. So, when the error is northward, the
machine tells the rudder to swing it across
southward, right? When it is going due east,

the ship has way on, rotational momentum,
and is going to go way over to the south of
east, and now it’s got a new error, and it’s
going to come back and go way over to the
north of east, and it’s going to go yawing all
across the Atlantic, right?

SB: This is hunting, technically.

BATESON: This is technically hunting, and
if you want to cut that down, what you've got
to do is to have a machine on top of that ma-
chine, another machine which measures the
rate at which the ship is correcting its error.
The faster it is correcting its error, the slower
you have it correct its error. It will then, you
see, actually hold itself before it gets to due
east. If you’ve ever handled the tiller of a small
boat, you know the problem.

SB: It’s a double layer in other words. The
first machine is treating the boat as something
which needs to be given negative feedback,
and then the second machine is treating the
first machine as something which needs to be
given negative feedback.

BATESON: That's right. You’ve got a hier-
archy of logical types there, and their various
complexities.

sB: Is feed forward a kind of discounting of
part of the corrective signal?

BATESON: It’s a discounting of the correc-
tive signal in terms of the error which the cor-
rective signal will generate if allowed to con-
tinue.

MEAD: Now, Stewart, what we thought we
were going to talk about, but you didn’t let us
say what we wanted to talk about, you started
something else under the pretense that you
wanted to start the tape recorder (I want to
point out I followed all those maneuvers) what
we had said we were going to talk about was
the need of having “some data flowing through
the system.”

SB: Some data flowing through the system?

BATESON: Yes, I set my classes an assign-
ment. If they can, they will handle it purely
abstractly. And they then get off into an awful
mess of ill-drawn abstractions which act upon
other ill-drawn abstractions. But if you can
make them fool around with data of any sort,
while they’re playing with the abstractions,

a5

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

then you get something. I keep a fish tank
going there, because a fish tank is a nice thing,
really, to have in the back of your mind while
you're thinking about whatever it might be.
Norbert Wiener, when he had a problem, used
to sit with the wind blowing on a curtain.

MEAD: | thought that was Von Neumann.

BATESON: It could have been Von Neu-
mann. Pitts did it by disturbing his hair.

Now, this goes along with: “always the mul-
tiple approach.” Any Hebrew poetry is like
this. “The candles are white, as translucent as
fishes,” you know. “Lilies for joy, and lilies for
funerals’; “How are the mighty fallen and the
weapons of war perished.” You get away from
the pure verbalism by double-phrasing.

You make two statements, and what is true
of both of them is the formal truth. This is
what is called explanation.

SB: It’s not that it’s a repetition of the mes-
sage, it’s different derivations of the same mes-
sage from different sources.

BATESON: Often. In psychoanalysis if you
can recognize the same formal pattern ina
dream and ina childhood memory and in how
you re treating your analyst, you will say,
“Aha, it’s true.’ You've got it.

MEAD: And when you're studying a culture.

SB: What would be an example there?

MEAD: Well, you find the same pattern re-
curring in different aspects of the culture. You
find, for instance, a house in which there’s no
ornamentation inside, all the ornamentation’s
on the gate. You find a people who are preoccu-
pied with the external aspects of their skin and
are always searching for some imperfection in
their skin and believe that any breakage will
impair them so that they’re imperfect for
something else, and so forth. With that kind
of understanding, if you’re told something,
you can tell whether it fits or not.

For instance, the Balinese told us that they
had marriage by capture, which didn’t suit
anything we'd understood about their culture.
Our cook was going to carry off a girl by cap-
ture, so Gregory went outside the gate with
him early in the morning, and the girl was
there waiting. They looked around and there
was nobody else there, so she trotted off with

36

him. If there had been another group there,
she would have pretended, she would have
screamed and been carried off, because that was
correct etiquette.

Then we had the case of a very stupid boy
who thought it was true. He carried off a girl
who had already planned to elope with some-
body else. It took the society months to sort
that out.

From a complex culture like Bali you take
a lot of chunks—birthday ceremonies and fu-
neral ceremonies, children’s games, and a
whole series of things, and then you analyze
them for the patterns that are there.

BATESON: In Jatmul they have flutes. The
flutes are long hollow bamboo, an inch and a
half thick, five feet long, and one hole here,
which you blow across. And from that you can
get about five notes by overblowing, by har-
monics. All right. You have a flute, you’re
blowing with me, and yours is tuned one tone
higher than mine. So your harmonics lie be-
tween mine, right? Between us we've got quite
a bit of scale. If we blow alternately we can
make a tune. Well, now this is how the genera-
tions are arranged. The grandparents go with
the grandchildren, and the parents go with
their grandchildren, and the initiation grades
are like seniors—juniors—sophomores-—fresh-
men, in which when you get a fight over initia-
tion, the seniors and the sophomores go to-
gether, and the juniors and the freshmen go
together. And so on.

SB: So what is the truth?

BATESON: The truth is that Iatmul like to
make this pattern. This is a pattern of organi-
zation that they think is nice.

MEAD: When Gregory and Waddington
talked to each other, I learned what I know
about the way English biologists think, by lis-
tening to the two of them. They would pick
their illustrations right across the field. One
minute from embryology, the next from geol-
ogy, the next from anthropology, back and
forth, very freely, so that the illustrations from
one spot illuminated, corrected, and expanded
the one from another. This is the thing that
Americans are not taught to do. In our school
system you have one year of chemistry, then

For God’s Sake, Margaret

you're through with chemistry probably, and
then you have one year of physics. Whereas in
the English system they took all of them at
once in smaller doses that went along.”

NORA BATESON: Goodbye.

MEAD: Goodbye. Are you going to school
now?

NORA: Yes.

MEAD: Well, it’s been lovely to see you,
Nora.

NORA: It’s been lovely to see you, too. Bye
bye.

BATESON: Goodbye.

NORA: Bye, Daddy.

SB: Margaret, an old student of yours told
me you have a list of reliable sources of in-
sight. What’s the list?

MEAD: I used to say to my classes that the
ways to get insight are: to study infants, to
study animals, to study primitive people, to be
psychoanalyzed, to have a religious conversion
and get over it, to have a psychotic episode and
get over it, or to have a love affair with an Old
Russian. And I stopped saying that when a lit-
tle dancer in the front row put up her hand and
said, “Does he have to be old?”

SB: How many of those have you done?

(Blank here while cassette was changed. Dr.
Mead said she had studied infants and primitive
people. When she got to animals in the list, the con-
versation swerved to Konrad Lorenz.)

MEAD: Watching Konrad Lorenz be simul-
taneously a bird and a worm is one of the really
magnificent things in the world. You've seen
that, haven’t you, when he’s describing a bird
catching a worm, and he’s both? Talk about
the whole system, there it is.

BATESON: One of the things I’ve always re-
gretted is that I didn’t film him lecturing in
Hawaii. One could’ve, I think. Lorenz is a
Aurignacian.

SB: How do you mean?

BATESON: | mean that he is identified with
animals. Aurignacians are the people who did
the cave paintings, the good ones. Lorenz goes
to the blackboard and there is a live dog, hesi-
tating between attacking and retreating. He
takes the eraser, and he wipes the tail off,
changes the angle by ten degrees, and flattens

out the hair on the back of the neck, and he
says, ‘“That dog’s going to run.” He sticks it
the other way, and ““That dog’s going to at-
tack.” And he is the dog while he’s talking
about it. And this goes for cichlid fishes, bees,
any goddamn thing. And then, in the final lec-
ture he gave in Hawaii, he got all mixed up,
you know, the way scientists do, with physics
and the Einsteinian universe, and his body got
twisted, as he started to talk about the Einstein-
ian universe where the straight lines are not
straight anymore. That’s what I wish I had on
the camera. The others all think this is very
unfair you know, he has all of this information
that they simply don’t have.

MEAD: He contributes tremendous zest. If
Lorenz is in a meeting, I can retire and take
notes and think and have no responsibility to
keep it going; whereas if he isn’t there, I very
often have to keep it awake. . .

Gregory, have you any ideas on the subject
of the harm that is done by television because
of the rigidity of the body of people watching
TV? Sartre discussed at one point what hap-
pened when you peek into a keyhole. When
you look through a keyhole, the whole body is
focused to try to use this very small aperture,
and he described what happens if you touch
somebody who is looking through a keyhole.
They jump. I have a big set, now, of compara-
tive pictures of family groups (they weren't
taken for this, they were taken for family al-
bums) reading and looking at TV. When the
family is reading, they’re a thousand years
away from each other, their eyes are all down,
but you get a sense of community and relaxa-
tion. Their bodies are very loose, and undoubt-
edly there’s movement going on as they read.
But when they're watching television, the
same people sit like this, they don’t touch each
other, and they’re very rigid.

We have lots of material that if you move in
your mind, your muscles don’t get stiff. For
years we had this very funny problem with
catatonics, such as a man who would stand all
day long in a ward with his eyes up and his
hands together in prayer, never moving.
They’d pick him up at night, tip him into a
bed, feed him artificially, and then after five

ad.

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

years or something, there'd be a fire. He’d
walk across the ward, pick up a telephone, re-
port, “Fire in ward five,” help get all the pa-
tients out, and then when the fire was out,
back he went to his position. But he was not
stiff. Whereas if you take the ordinary person
and put them in bed for three months, they
have to relearn how to walk. All the data we
now have on monitoring muscles with tiny
transistor monitors shows, if you think about
skiing or exercising, the muscles that you use
to ski will respond.

If you inhibit movement, as one does watch-
ing TV, with no empathy, no muscular in-
volvement at all, I think this is the thing that’s
doing harm.

BATESON: I was wondering about looking
through, for example, a camera.

MEAD: Remember Clara Lambert and when
you were trying to teach her? That woman
who was making photographic studies of play
schools, but she was using the camera as a tele-
scope instead of as a camera. You said, “‘She’ll
never be a photographer. She keeps using the
camera to look at things.” But you didn’t. You
always used a camera to take a picture, which
is a different activity.

BATESON: Yes. By the way, I don’t like cam-
eras on tripods, just grinding. In the latter
part of the schizophrenic project, we had cam-
eras on tripods just grinding.

MEAD: And you don’t like that?

BATESON: Disastrous.

MEAD: Why?

BATESON: Because | think the photographic
record should be an art form.

MEAD: Oh why? Why shouldn’t you have
some records that aren’t art forms? Because if
it’s an art form, it has been altered.

BATESON: It’s undoubtedly been altered. I
don’t think it exists unaltered.

MEAD: I think it’s very important, if you're
going to be scientific about behavior, to give
other people access to the material, as compa-
rable as possible to the access you had. You
don’t, then, alter the material. There’s a bunch
of filmmakers now that are saying, “It should
be art,” and wrecking everything that we’re
trying todo. Why the hell should it be art?

BATESON: Well, it should be off the tripod.

38

MEAD: So you run around.

BATESON: Yes.

MEAD: And therefore you’ve introduced a
variation into it that is unnecessary.

BATESON: I therefore got the information
out that I thought was relevant at the time.

MEAD: That’s right. And therefore what do
you see later?

BATESON: If you put the damn thing ona
tripod, you don’t get any relevance.

MEAD: No, you get what happened.

BATESON: It isn’t what happened.

MEAD: I don’t want people leaping around
thinking that a profile at this moment would
be beautiful.

BATESON: I wouldn’t want beautiful.

MEAD: Well, what’s the leaping around for?

BATESON: To get what’s happening.

MEAD: What you think is happening.

BATESON: If Stewart reached behind his
back to scratch himself, I would like to be over
there at that moment.

MEAD: If you were over there at that mo-
ment you wouldn’t see him kicking the cat un-
der the table. So that just doesn’t hold as an
argument.

BATESON: Of the things that happen the
camera is only going to record one percent
anyway.

MEAD: That’s right.

BATESON: I want the one percent on the
whole to tell.

MEAD: Look, I’ve worked with these things
that were done by artistic film makers, and the
result is you can’t do anything with them.

BATESON: They’re bad artists, then.

MEAD: No, they’re not. I mean, an artistic
film maker can make a beautiful notion of
what he thinks is there, and you can’t do any
subsequent analysis with it of any kind. That’s
been the trouble with anthropology, because
they had to trust us. If we were good enough
instruments, and we said the people in this
culture did something more than the ones in
that, if they trusted us, they used it. But there
was no way of probing further into the mate-
rial. So we gradually developed the idea of film
and tapes.

BATESON: There’s never going to be any way
of probing further into the material.

For God’s Sake, Margaret

MEAD: What are you talking about, Greg-
ory? I don’t know what you're talking about.
Certainly, when we showed that Balinese stuff
that first summer there were different things
that people identified—the limpness that Mar-
ion Stranahan identified, the place on the chest
and its point in child development that Erik
Erikson identified. I can go back over it, and
show you what they got out of those films.
They didn’t get it out of your head, and they
didn’t get it out of the way you were pointing
the camera. They got it because it was a long
enough run so they could see what was
happening.

SB: What about something like that Navajo
film, “Intrepid Shadows’’?’°

MEAD: Well, that is a beautiful, an artistic
production that tells you something about a
Navajo artist.

BATESON: This is different, it’s a native
work of art.

MEAD: Yes, and a beautiful native work of
art. But the only thing you can do more with
that is analyze the film maker, which I did. I
figured out how he got the animation into the
trees.

BATESON: Oh yes? What do you get out of
that one?

MEAD: He picked windy days, he walked as
he photographed, and he moved the camera in-
dependently of the movement of his own body.
And that gives you that effect. Well, are you
going to say, following what all those other
people have been able to get out of those films
of yours, that you should have just been
artistic?

SB: He’s saying he was artistic.

MEAD: No, he wasn’t. I mean, he’s a good
film maker, and Balinese can pose very nicely,
but his effort was to hold the camera steady
enough long enough to get a sequence of
behavior.

BATESON: To find out what’s happening,
yes.

MEAD: When you’re jumping around taking
pictures...

BATESON: Nobody’s talking about that,
Margaret, for God’s sake.

MEAD: Well.

BATESON: I’m talking about having control

of a camera. You're talking about putting a
dead camera on top of a bloody tripod. It sees
nothing.

MEAD: Well, I think it sees a great deal. I’ve
worked with these pictures taken by artists,
and really good ones. .

BATESON: I’m sorry I said artists; all I
meant was artists. I mean, artist is not a term
of abuse in my vocabulary.

MEAD: It isn’t in mine either, butI. . .

BATESON: Well, in this conversation, it’s
become one.

MEAD: Well, I’m sorry. It just produces
something different. I’ve tried to use “Dead
Birds," for instance. . .

BATESON: | don’t understand “Dead Birds’
at all. I’ve looked at ““Dead Birds,” and it
makes no sense.

MEAD: I think it makes plenty of sense.

BATESON: But how it was made I have no
idea at all.

MEAD: Well, there is never a long-enough
sequence of anything, and you said absolutely
that what one needed was long, long sequences
from one position in the direction of two peo-
ple. You've said that in print. Are you going to
take it back?

BATESON: Yes, well, a long sequence in my
vocabulary is twenty seconds.

MEAD: Well, it wasn’t when you were writ-
ing about Balinese films. It was three minutes.
It was the longest that you could wind the
camera at that point.

BATESON: A very few sequences ran to the
length of the winding of the camera.

MEAD: But if at that point you had had a
camera that would run twelve hundred feet,
you'd have run it.

BATESON: I would have and I'd have been
wrong.

MEAD: I don’t think so for one minute.

BATESON: The Balinese film wouldn’t be
worth one quarter.

MEAD: All right. That’s a point where I to-
tally disagree. It’s not science.

BATESON: I don’t know what science is, I
don’t know what art is.

MEAD: That’s all right. If you don’t, that’s
quite simple. I do. [To Stewart:} With the films
that Gregory’s now repudiating that he took,

39

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

we have had twenty-five years of re-examina-
tion and re-examination of the material.

BATESON: It’s pretty rich material.

MEAD: It is rich, because they’re long se-
quences, and that’s what you need.

BATESON: There are no long sequences.

MEAD: Oh, compared with anything
anybody else does, Gregory.

BATESON: But they’re trained not to.

MEAD: There are sequences that are long
enough to analyze. . .

BATESON: Taken from the right place!

MEAD: Taken from one place.

BATESON: Taken from the place that aver-
aged better than other places.

MEAD: Well, you put your camera there.
BATESON: You can’t do that with a tripod.
You're stuck. The thing grinds for twelve hun-

dred feet. It’s a bore.

MEAD: Well, you prefer twenty seconds to
twelve hundred feet.

BATESON: Indeed, I do.

MEAD: Which shows you get bored very
easily.

BATESON: Yes, I do.

MEAD: Well, there are other people who
don’t, you know? Take the films that Betty
Thompson studied.'* That Karbo sequence—
it’s beautiful—she was willing to work on it
for six months. You’ve never been willing to
work on things that length of time, but you
shouldn’t object to other people who can do it,
and giving them the material to do it.

There were times in the field when I worked
with people without filming, and therefore
have not been able to subject the material to
changing theory, as we were able to do with
the Balinese stuff. So when I went back to Bali
I didn’t see new things. When I went back to
Manus, I did, where I had only still photo-
graphs. If you have film, as your own percep-
tion develops, you can re-examine it in the
light of the material to some extent. One of
the things, Gregory, that we examined in the
stills, was the extent to which people, if they
leaned against other people, let their mouths
fall slack. We got that out of examining lots
and lots of stills. It’s the same principle. It’s
quite different if you have a thesis and have the
camera in your hand, the chances of influenc-

40

ing the material are greater. When you don’t
have the camera in your hand, you can look at
the things that happen in the background.

BATESON: There are three ends to this dis-
cussion. There’s the sort of film I want to
make, there’s the sort of film that they want to
make in New Mexico (which is ‘Dead Birds,”
substantially), and there is the sort of film that
is made by leaving the camera on a tripod and
not paying attention to it.

sB: Who does that?

BATESON: Oh, psychiatrists do that. Albert
Scheflen’* leaves a video camera in somebody’s
house and goes home. It’s stuck in the wall.

MEAD: Well, I thoroughly disapprove of the
people that want video so they won’t have to
look. They hand it over to an unfortunate stu-
dent who then does the rest of the work and
adds up the figures, and they write a book. We
both object to this. But I do think if you look
at your long sequences of stills, leave out the
film for a minute, that those long, very rapid
sequences, Koewat Raoeh, those stills, they’re
magnificent, and you can doa great deal with
them. And if you hadn’t stayed in the same
place, you wouldn’t have those sequences.

sB: Has anyone else done that since?

MEAD: Nobody has been as good a photo-
grapher as Gregory at this sort of thing. People
are very unwilling to do it, very unwilling.

SB: I haven’t seen any books that come even
close to Balinese Character .“*

MEAD: That’s right, they never have. And
now Gregory is saying it was wrong to do what
he did in Bali. Gregory was the only person
who was ever successful at taking stills and
film at the same time, which you did by put-
ting one on a tripod, and having both at the
same focal length.

BATESON: It was having one in my hand and
the other round my neck.

MEAD: Some of the time, and some not.

BATESON: We used the tripod occasionally
when we were using long telephoto lenses.

MEAD: We used it for the bathing babies. I
think the difference between art and science is
that each artistic event is unique, whereas in
science sooner or later once you get some kind
of theory going somebody or other will make
the same discovery.'* The principal point is ac-

For God’s Sake, Margaret

cess, so that other people can look at your ma-
terial, and come to understand it, and share it.
The only real information that “Dead Birds”
gives anybody are things like the thing that
my imagination had never really encompassed,
and that’s the effect of cutting off joints of fin-
gers. You remember? The women cut off a
joint for every death that they mourn for, and
they start when they’re little girls, so that by
the time they're grown women, they have no
fingers. All the fine work is done by the men in
that society, the crocheting and what not, be-
cause the men have fingers to do it with, and
the women have these stumps of hands. I knew
about it, I had read about it, it had no mean-
ing to me until I saw those pictures. There are
lots of things that can be conveyed by this
quasi-artistic film, but when we want to sug-
gest to people that it’s a good idea to know
what goes on between people, which is what
you ve always stressed, we still have to show
your films, because there aren’t any others that
are anything like as good.

SB: Isn’t that a little shocking? It’s been,
what, years?

MEAD: Very shocking.

BATESON: It’s because people are getting
good at putting cameras on tripods. It isn’t
what happens between people.

MEAD: Nobody’s put any cameras on tripods
in those twenty-five years that looked at any-
thing that mattered.

BATESON: They haven’t looked at anything
that mattered, anyway. All right.

SB: I have a question that maybe relates to
that, maybe not. What about field workers
that join the tribe? Frank Cushing with the
Zuni, and Carlos Castaneda, and such.

MEAD: Castaneda hasn’t joined the tribe.

SB: He hasn't joined the tribe, he’s tried to
join the practice.

MEAD: No, only intermittently. We have
examples. Edmund Carpenter’s been making a
study of these people.

sB: I’ve got some too. Everyone that knows
anthropologists knows someone who’s a little
wiggy because of some over-zealous participa-
tion in something. And I wonder about that.

MEAD: It’s the temptation for another cul-
ture. We also have a case of a man who was

studying the Chinese, and he married a
Chinese girl. Which he then thought was
enough anthropology; for quite a while he
couldn’t do anything else. It’s a lot easier to
study the cultures where you can’t marry peo-
ple, where there’s such a gulf that that kind of
over-identification doesn’t occur. The minute
you study a culture where you might marry
them, or adopt their children, or be adopted
by them, you get new complications. Extreme
ones.

SB: Sometimes the ones who lose track of
where they are, they find a place to be confused
between, and proceed to be confused between
it.

MEAD: I think that’s a function of people
who are confused wherever they are, anyway.
One difference between pre-World War II an-
thropology and post-World War II is that most
of us who did the pre-war work grew up in rea-
sonably coherent cultures, and we knew what a
pattern was when we saw one. ‘© Remember
that paper that I wrote that you invented the
word “quizbits” for? (But the paper’s called
“Customs and Mores.’’’’) It was a discussion of
the extent to which information was being bro-
ken up into meaningless bits and fed to people.
All your experience is chopped, everything out
of scale. The news over the radio—one event is
of world significance, the next is nothing. Con-
temporary young people have had the things
that are presented to them so chopped up.

SB: You mean just in the speed with which
they change, or the lack of integration?

MEAD: The lack of integration. You get it
on radio in New Guinea: “Khrushchev has
been deposed, there was a jewel robbery in the
American Museum of Natural History, two
small boats off Port Moresby have sunk,” that’s
the news.

{Lois Bateson leans in on her way to an errand.
Margaret will be gone by the time she returns. “OK,
you people. See you in a while. I’m real glad you
came, Margaret. Come again.’’}

MEAD: Well, it’s been lovely to see you.

sB: You mentioned Gerry O’Neill a while
ago, as though you re somewhat involved in
the space colony business.

MEAD: Well, I’ve been interested in them,
because of the possibilities of diversity. You

41

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

1976, leaving Santa Cruz

see, I’ve always loved the Pacific islands, be-
cause they have such high degrees of diversity.
When John Stroud first told me about space
colonies, the picture was that you could have
an area about the size of Los Angeles, and they
would be undisturbed for 1500 years, so they
could vary.

SB: I have a question that goes back to the
Macy conferences, and it also relates to projects
that Gregory’s getting interested in now. What
is the history of the failure of conceptual cy-
bernetics to become public knowledge? You
said that the later Macy meetings were starting
to get a sense that you had something that
everybody ought to know.

MEAD: It wasn’t quite as deep as that. We
thought we had something that would be
cross-disciplinary language. The meeting we
had with the Academy of Sciences was to in-
clude more of the scientific community. Now,
I worked a lot on that idea. Continuities in Cul-
tural Evolution deals with the fact that in social
science, unless you can carry the public with
you, you can’t use your findings. I think that
we could trace part of the lack of response to

42

the American preference for linear sequences,
which is very high. It’s like the Manus, too.
They’re both moral cause-and-effect societies.
You do this, and that happens.

A problem I was going to raise, to Gregory,
is why do you think the United States has more
runaway positive feedbacks than most cultures?

SB: Such as?

MEAD: Such as, gasoline taxes that can only
be used on roads. With the tax you build more
roads, which makes it possible to have more
cars, which uses more gasoline. It’s a perfect
endless runaway. We have hundreds of them in
this country.

BATESON: I think one of the things that’s
serious in this country is using the value one
can catch hold of, rather than the real value.
Such as, catching gangsters for their income
tax returns. I had a whole series of examples
of this at one stage. The actual feedback circuit
runs upon a collateral variable and you don’t,
from the circuit, get insight into the whole
structure.

SB: Still, you say that’s good when it comes
to something like oxygen or carbon dioxide
being the controller of breathing rates.

BATESON: This is exactly the problem.
Where do you want to do this, and where do
you want not to do it? At one stage I was say-
ing, the thing to do is never to use the lethal
variable to control the feedback.

MEAD: The lethal variable?

BATESON: This was in asphyxia. The rate of
breathing is not affected by the lack of oxygen
but by the surplus of carbon dioxide in the
blood. If you try to regulate by the lack of oxy-
gen, it’s already too late.

MEAD: Well, we said the same thing, that
if you're teaching children nutritional habits,
don’t do it with something that’s related to nu-
trition. It’s much safer to say, “We'll take you
to a circus if you eat your spinach,” than to say,
“If you eat your spinach, you can have ice
cream.”

SB: Safer means?

MEAD: Safer socially when you're bringing
up children and you want them to learn to eat
nutritionally good diets effortlessly. When you
tie the eating to the food itself, if a child wants

|

For God’s Sake, Margaret

to fight about it, they fight about it by not eat-
ing the right food. So that you put all the trou-
ble into the system. The Balinese say to a child
when dressing a cut, “Listen to the gong, lis-
ten to the orchestra, go and see an orchestra!”
There’s no orchestra. She’s just presenting
something pleasant. Italian mothers do that.
They say. “Ice cream! Ice cream! Lovely ice
cream! Lovely ice cream!” while the child’s
having a cut fixed.

Americans say, “But she didn’t mean it, she
didn’t give him any ice cream.” Watergate, of
course, was an outstanding example. We
didn’t have to get Nixon because of Watergate.
We were using Watergate because he was tak-
ing the country apart and had delusions of
grandeur. I think if we’d known about the in-
come tax, that would have done it.

I’ve wondered, Gregory, whether all of these
things go together—the nonrecognition of cy-
bernetics in this country, as compared with the
Soviet Union. I figure that they have about a
hundred times as many people that understand
the whole thing.

SB: Understanding it creatively and coming
up with new thoughts?

MEAD: That one doesn’t know. We do know
that they are using it for purposes of social or-
ganization, especially in Czechoslovakia.

BATESON: At that first cybernetic meeting
we had a Russian talk. He hadn’t much idea
what it was all about, I thought.

MEAD: I don’t remember what he said at all.
BATESON: He had fifteen slides of circuit
structures that would do various sorts of things

like pattern recognition, or control tempera-
ture, or something. It was sort of about the
level of the McCulloch and Pitts papers. With-
out, as far as I could make out, the enormous
theoretical spin-off that those papers had.

MEAD: And evidently I wrote him off so I
can’t remember.

BATESON: I think you wrote him off. I
wrote him off very quickly.

MEAD: Well, we had a period where I
thought we could take cybernetics and use it as
a language for communicating with the Rus-
sians, and then somebody in this country de-
cided that the Russian cybernetic activities

were very dangerous, and we had a big intelli-
gence report on cybernetics. It ceased to be
politics-free and was no longer useful. I wrote
up a discussion of that, and decided anyway,
that instead of having a methodology or con-
ceptual scheme for communication, it was
much better to have agreed-on subgoals for
communication between two systems as an-
tithetical as the Soviet and U.S.”

SB: Well, then something funny seemed to
happen with the whole general systems bunch.
I’ve never understood that.

MEAD: Well, there are a dreadful lot of sys-
tems people in the Society for General Systems
Research. Then von Bertalanffy died. Anatol
Rappaport runs a very isolated group. Now,
when the Society for General Systems Research
was formed in Atlanta, and Anatol was in the
chair (I had never met him), and Ross Ashby
was there on the front row, and there were
about twenty people there, I went back to the
correspondence, Gregory, where you had pro-
posed that we plan an organization in relation
to its purposes. This was before the cybernetics
meetings, while you were overseas. When the
Society for General Systems Research was
formed, I proposed that we apply general sys-
tems to our society. Nobody knew who I was
and I was feeling like the little old lady in ten-
nis shoes. I went up at the end of it and talked
to Ashby, and he said, ‘““You mean we should
apply our principles to ourselves?”

BATESON: In what tone of voice?

MEAD: He was repudiating it, ina light
playful voice that was appropriate, but he was
repudiating it.

SB: So it was stillborn.

MEAD: So now, the Society for General Sys-
tems Research, which is proliferating, is pro-
liferating by the standard methods that are
used in this country—regional chapters. I said
to Dick Erickson, “I don’t think we should be
so conventional, we ought to think of some-
thing better.” We can’t get anybody to use any
kind of constructive thinking on the problems
of organization. And, of course, there’s no
place where you can get a well-rounded degree
in General System Theory. Rand has a school
that is almost entirely military.

43

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

One of the most crazy situations—I was
asked to speak at a dinner of the Air Force cele-
brating their fifth decade of Air Force intelli-
gence. I talked about the fact that they weren’t
paying attention to the whole; the Air Force
was modeling the Soviet Union as a system,
and the Army was modeling the United States
as a system, using different units, and they
were both ignoring the fact that China existed,
and therefore were making a hopeless mess
when you knew you had a universe to deal
with. What I was telling them was to use cy-
bernetic thinking as it had developed into gen-
eral systems theory. The next morning I was on
a chartered plane bringing me back, and there
was a man on it who said, “You left me way
behind. I couldn’t understand a word you
said.” I said, ““What are you?” He said, “I’m
an electronic specialist.”

Americans are always solving problems
piecemeal. They’re always solving them de nou-
veau and artificially because they’re all new-
comers and they don’t have decisions grounded
in a culture.

NOTES

1. The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1930-1955. New
York: The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1955, p. 20.

Cybernetics. Transactions of the Eighth Conference,
March 15~—16, 1951. New York: The Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, 1952, p. xix.

2. Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian
Bigelow. “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of
Science. vol. 10, 1942, p. 18.

3. Bateson, Gregory. Naven. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1936. 2nd edition, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1958.

4. L.R. Richardson, ‘Generalized Foreign Policies,”
British Journal of Psychology, Monography Supplement
XXIII, 1939.

5. Claude Bernard. Lecons sur les Phénoménes de la Vie
Communes aux Animaux et aux Végétaux. 2 vols. Paris: J. B.
Bailliere, 1878-1879.

6. W. B. Cannon. The Wisdom of the Body. New York:
Norton, 1932.

7. Karen Horney. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time.
New York: Norton, 1937.

8. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Technology Press, 1948.

9. C. H. Waddington, The Evolution of an Evolutionist.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

10. Sol Worth and John Adair. Through Navajo Eyes.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972.

44

“Intrepid Shadows” was made by Al Clah, a 19-year-old
Navajo painter and sculptor.

11. Dead Birds. Directed by Robert Gardner for the
Peabody Museum, Harvard University, color, 83 min-
utes, 1964. Available through New York Public Library.

12. Betty Thompson. ‘Development and Trial Applica-
tions of Method for Identifying Non-Vocal Parent-Child
Communications in Research Film” (Ph.D. thesis,
Teachers College, New York, 1970).

13. Albert E. Scheflen. Body Language and the Social Or-
der: Communication as Behavioral Control. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973.

14. M. Mead and G. Bateson. Balinese Character: A Pho-
tographic Analysis. New York: The New York Academy of
Sciences, Special Publications, 11, 1942; reissued 1962.

15. M. Mead. ‘“Towards a Human Science,” Science, vol.
191 (March 1976), pp. 903-909.

16. M. Mead. “From Intuition to Analysis in Commu-
nication Research,” Semiotica, vol. 1 (1969), pp. 13-25.

17. M. Mead. “Customs and Mores,” American Journal
of Sociology, vol. 47 (1942), pp. 971-980.

18. M. Mead. Continuities in Cultural Evolution. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

19. M. Mead. “Crossing Boundaries in Social Science
Communication,” Social Science Information, vol. 8 (1969),

PP Jas

COUNSEL FOR A SUICIDE’S FRIEND
23 May
Dear Prof. Bateson:

I talked with you yesterday morning and
near the end you asked me if I had any specific
questions. I did but couldn’t bring myself to
ask them, but find that I really do want to ask
them so this letter.

First unasked question has to do with some-
thing said to the effect that “if your heart’s in
the frying pan, then you can’t go wrong.”
Well, obviously, nothing much can be done if
your heart’s not in the frying pan, but what if
your guts are in it and things go wrong.

What I’m talking about is I was introduced
to a young woman about two years ago by my
ex-shrink because he was feeling a bit stuck
with her & on the other her craziness reminded
him of mine, so she & I became friends &
struggled through a lot of “if it’s not clear, I'll |
prove it” stuff and “‘Are you going to desert
me/believe I’m a terrible person now? now?
now?” stuff.

Anyway she suicided eight months ago. At
2m:

For God’s Sake, Margaret

I am not willing to accept the premise that
we were not really friends as I know I was
there and was paying attention. So I’m stuck,
amongst other things, with trying to sort out
how I can legitimately (to myself mainly) as-
pire to trying to help others with their crazi-
nesses? Have I the courage—yes and no. That
is, I still think I understand some of it, but
doubt whether that understanding is suffi-
cient. And if it isn’t, what is?

Which brings me to unasked question #2.
One thing that looks to me as if it had the pos-
sibility of being sufficient is small communi-
ties like Kingsley Hall, the Granville Road
house, etc. What mostly worries me about
them is how do you get a community stable
enough to sustain itself and support people
working on their maps but not get tangled up
in questions of stability and/or minimizing
chaos as to interfere with people’s working?

Respectfully

27 May 1973
Dear

I am sorry I did not manage to answer your
letter while I was in Seattle.

I suggest that you consider and complete in
_ your imagination the following scenario (after
all, it is in your imagination that change ts re-
_ quested or needed):
Your friend has achieved her suicide and
_ arrived at the Pearly Gates, where she is chal-
_ lenged by St. Peter, who notes that she has
_ come too soon. She says that it was all

’s fault.

There are many ways of completing the sce-
| nario, but one way or another, your friend has
| to demonstrate that she had no free will but
| you had. I suggest either that you both had
| free will or that neither of you had.
Of course it is gratifying to you and to all
_ therapists to believe that they have more free
| will than their patients. But it won't do.
_ Your problem is to stop the boat rocking be-
_ tween the arrogance of “I had the power and
_ the knowledge to help” and the self-repudia-
tion of “I failed.”
Your second question is much more diffi-

cult, but the answer is I suppose really a corol-
lary following from what I have just said. You
will always be terrified of the things which will
inevitably happen in any therapeutic commu-
nity if you start out with a false estimate of the
power and the wisdom of whoever it is that
runs the community (especially if it’s you).
What one human being can do for another is
not quite nothing, but it probably sometimes
helps the helpee when the helper is clear about
how little help can be given. Some temporary
protection from the cold winds of an insane
civilization, some shared tears and laughter,
and that’s about it.
Yours sincerely,
Gregory Bateson
Santa Cruz, California

{Spring, 1975]

PROTECT THE TROPHIES,
SLAY THE CHILDREN

Dear S. B.

I want to raise a question and CQ is perhaps
a good place for it. My mathematics is not
good enough but perhaps Peter Warshall or
one of your readers will tell me the answer.

The question is simple: Is it good practice
to eat up big animals rather than small ones?
Would it not make better sense in terms of
conserving wild populations to eat the small
fish and throw the big ones back?

After all it is the big ones that produce the
eggs and sperm—in millions in many cases.

Fish, crabs, lobsters, abalone, deer—in al-
most all hunting or “harvesting” of wild ani-
mals the law protects the juveniles and permits
the taking of the adults. But I suspect that this
is based upon some sentimental fallacy.

The question looks like this: Suppose that
fish of a given species produce N offspring per
female adult per year; that of these offspring
.O1% start to produce their own offspring in 3
years and go on producing for 3 years. Which
should we eat—the bearing adults, the new
adults, or the pre-adolescents?

I suspect that the .o1% figure is rather sta-
ble in the sense that predation by birds, bigger
fish, bacterial infection, epidemics, etc., etc.,
will be a function of density of population. If

45

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead

there are more baby fish, the predators will get
more. If this be so, and we eat a lot of the ba-
bies, this will simply leave fewer babies for the
other predators to eat and the number of babies
who reach reproductive maturity will not be
severely reduced. Perhaps?

What will the relevant mathematics look
like for creatures like salmon who spawn only
once? Creatures which have few babies and a
high survival rate, as contrasted with fish with
many free-floating eggs? And so on.

46

Was Hillaire Belloc right in his ecological
jingle:
Parents of large families
With claims to common sense
Find a tiger well repays
The trouble and expense.
Yours infantivorously,
Gregory Bateson
Santa Cruz, California
{Spring 1978}

STEVE BAER

The Sun Riots
and The B&G

This author thinks differently about
energy and technology than other
writers. As Stewart said in the first
CQ introduction to Steve Baer, in
Spring 1975: “Characters like Spe-
cific Heat, Turbidity Factor, Angle
of Incidence, and Dewpoint /ive as
thoroughly for Baer as Bored Social-
ite, Desperate Poet, and Vengeful
Brother might for a playwright or
novelist.”

The first of these two essays, “The
Sun Riots,” appeared in that issue.
The second, “The B&G,” appeared
a year later in the Summer 1976 CQ.
It began as a college talk. More than
a dozen Baer essays appeared in CQ
during its ten years. If you want to
see more, his 1975 book Sunspots is
still in print (from Madrona Publish-
ers, Seattle, WA). To quote Stewart
again: “If a real philosopher were a
real engineer, he would write like
this.”

Steve Baer is the proprietor of
Zomeworks, a company based in Al-
buquerque, New Mexico, which has
designed and sold innovative solar
and insulating technology since the
late Gos.

Art Kleiner

THE SUN RIOTS

The chief of police in a southwestern city is
talking on the telephone to the city mainte-
nance department—“I want reflective blinds
on every goddamned window and if you can’t
get enough of them then tape tinfoil over the
rest of the windows, now! Before that damn
sun comes up again.”

The bottom offices of City Hall and the po-
lice department have been gutted by fire—
black streaks surround the windows which are
now opaque and shiny with aluminum foil.
The police are still unable to confiscate mir-
rors, the matter is in the courts.

A week earlier at a demonstration a large
van driven next to the crowd—the driver, a
swarthy man of about forty, opened the back
doors and began passing out foot-square mir-
rors. ‘Give em some sunshine!”

A few dozen mirrors began playing beams of
sunlight on a police car that had been dogging
the rear end of the demonstration. The officers
were caught by surprise. The driver managed
to back the car down the street, but not before
his partner, panicked by the glare and the rap-
idly rising temperature, had jumped out and
run. More and more mirrors were out in the
crowd now. The crowd glinted like a bank of
crystals.

It couldn’t reach the police car which had
found protection behind a drive-up liquor
store. The man with the van now stood on top
of it. An old bread delivery van, “‘Let’s burn it
up. Yeh—this.”

His voice is hoarse and breaking. A few mir-
rors flit across the van and the man on top.
More focus on the tin side. The man climbs
off. People are pulling the last mirrors from
inside the van as others begin to focus on it.
There are 800 mirrors out in the street.

47

Steve Baer

The crowd is silent. The blob of brilliant
light on the side of the truck is fringed with
trembling squares of light flitting in and out
of the target. You can hardly hear a noise.
Then the sheet metal side of the van oil cans
as the metal swells. A few more moments and
smoke appears—the crowd has results. That
was at I1 A.M.; by dark there have been 100
fires.

No one on foot has been burned—too hard
to follow a man on foot. Rows of smoking
cars—the ashes of a flag at City Hall.

It’s the office buildings—the windows above
the street—the crowd focuses through one win-
dow after another—the curtains go fast.

The police appear with arc welders’ masks.
They fire on the demonstrators. The demon-
strators disperse, but the light keeps coming.
More mirrors appear on the street—funny-
shaped mirrors, mirrors with ornamental
frames, tiny pocket mirrors in the hands of
children.

Smoke is seen from another part of town.

Television crews arrive. The footage in the
evening news across the nation is overexposed.
An occasional clear image and then the picture
goes white and overexposed.

The mirror crowds are completely silent—
moving everywhere on foot. A secretary at City
Hall, “They just looked so funny—a whole
crowd of them standing just as still as could be
holding on to those mirrors and then pretty
soon the store across the street was burning.”

“When they started coming our way they
just glinted and shined like a drawer full of
diamonds—when they steadied down again we
got out of there fast because they were burning
up Captain Garcia’s office downstairs.”

“Get those damned kids with the mirrors off
the streetsy

“But officers, I’m just usin’ this mirror
‘cause I’m combin’ my hair, no law against
combin’ your hair is there?”

Dozens of youths in the street combing
their hair peering into gigantic foot-square
mirrors.

48

THE B&G

I don’t think there is a proper understanding of
buildings, particularly institutional buildings.
What activities are they really built for? I re-
member in college the B & G, which stands for
Buildings and Grounds. They ran the school.
There are such crews all across the world. Why
are we so obsessed with the FBI and the CIA
when there is the B & G? They wear dark gray
or green uniforms. Personnel are not accepted
below the age of thirty-five; stocky, lumpy
physiques are preferred, or some form of lame-
ness. Requirements are to be able to carry an
enormous ring of keys with the proper
seriousness.

You hear stories of the communists where
some lowly sweeper or maid is actually party
commissioner in a factory and the factory man-
ager may have to seek him out in the toilet for
advice or directions. We have all seen the same
thing.

We are at an evening lecture at the univer-
sity. The distinguished professor, scientist,
author is before us. The topic is fascinating.
There are lively questions and discussion. Sud-
denly, at 9 P.M. a side door opens slowly and a
middle-aged woman appears in a gray uni-
form—behind her in the hall you can see the
mop bucket. She says nothing, merely looks at
the lecturer for a few moments. He is looking
the other way and doesn’t see her, but he feels a
cold draft on his back and senses his audience’s
attention is wandering. The woman goes on to
some other chore, but the door is left open. It’s
as if we were all taking a bath and someone has
now started to drain the tub. There is no strug-
gle. The students, only too ready to give the
Dean the finger or belch while a professor is
making a point, seem obedient to the B&G.
Five minutes later, the woman appears again—
the lecturer has tried to rally the audience, who
now seem distracted. On this visit she has her
mop. She catches the lecturer’s eye for a mo-
ment and gives the mop a little shake—a very
much less dramatic version of what you imag-
ine a bullfighter’s message to a sinking bull
may be. The lecture begins to close and the

}
i

|

TheB&G

woman starts hauling in her equipment.
“Sorry sir, but the building is to be locked at
5300"

No one shouts out, “Fuck the dust, on with
our discussion!” Radicals, jocks, gays, femin-
ists, engineers—all bow to the B&G.

Of what importance is such a scene? Not
much in one sense, but then again this may be
the tiny corner of a vast empire of stupidity
and obedience to schedules and demands which

_ have nothing to do with the more important

uses of architecture. Let’s be on our way—
track down the power flowing through the
maid with her lowly mop and message about

| the building closing at 9:30. Let’s go on and
_ examine the heating and cooling system, the

lights, the ventilation. Finally, far back in the

_ hierarchy of the support machinery of the
B&G, we might find the atom bomb itself.

After long consideration of the B & G and
the power they wield, we may conclude that
man is not merely a ‘‘tool-using animal,’ as he
is sometimes defined, but a “‘tool-hypnotized
animal” ready to show concern for collections
of pipes and wires as if they were parts of his

| own body. Ready to obey the equipment care-
| takers in even the most improbable circum-

| stances. We may have opened a question that

| demands another Freud to begin to solve the

puzzles. Someone to examine emotions aroused
by copper pipes, marble floors, plate glass,

| locks. The architect seems helpless to grapple

with the forces at work. Caught in the crossfire

| of concrete trucks, heating and ventilating

| equipment salesmen, and furniture suppliers,

| he dodges to the side agreeing to a space where
| the wares can be installed. And somewhere in

the subconscious, sensing the times, I suspect
most of us have caught the smell of the atomic

| bomb and the guided missile coming in to
|help with “respect” for the equipment.

Is the professor obedient to the B & G be-

cause in his heart he feels all his talk about sci-
|ence or culture is really a lot of hot air, perhaps
a diverting act to take up time between impor-

tant activities such as mopping the building?

|How much are words and ideas worth com-
pared to bricks, glass, copper pipes? It depends

on how you feel—which, of course, is what is
fascinating about the B & G taking over a
university.

What if the B & Gare really the only people
who ever work at the university? Certainly ina
factory where the janitor is up against milling
machines, punch presses, and chem mill tanks
you don’t see him throwing his weight around.
The punch press operator, though he may earn
only half as much as the professor, would
hardly have time to glance at the cleanup man.

Every technical achievement strengthens the
hand of the B&G. Every song, every poem,
every scientific discovery strengthens that of
the teacher and the student.

I don’t mean all these words as merely some
diversion about school days. These attitudes
go beyond school and beyond the mop and
broom.

It is common knowledge that filth and
grime in buildings is bad. It makes you suspi-
cious of the occupants. In a sense it is a moral
failure—lack of attention. Once a floor is
built, it should be swept and mopped. It’s as if
one had signed a contract on pouring the slab.
Once a window is installed, it should be
cleaned.

The same contract seems to appear on the
installation of a central heating system and
thermostat. They demand a standard be main-
tained even if people are not there, for now it
has become a moral issue—are you or are you
not going to live up to your agreement with
the equipment?

The comfort of the occupant is really of sec-
ondary concern. The same logic applies to
lighting systems.

I believe the school and university is a prime
battleground in spreading obedience to equip-
ment, schedules, routines, investments, etc.
The man who wants to display how well he has
trained a dog waits until the dog’s dinner is in
his bowl, then calls Rex and has him roll over,
sit, shake hands, or whatever interesting ritual
he has taught the dog. All the while the dinner
and its odor are so close by. It emphasizes the
power of training. And so it is with the small,
seemingly powerless band of uneducated em-

49

Steve Baer

ployees wandering about the institutions of
learning—going into the closets under the
stairs—coming up from the boiler room in the
basement. The furnace versus ancient history?
Don't be silly! The two are completely differ-
ent. The furnace keeps the building warm so
that you can concentrate in the classroom on
what the professor is telling you about ancient
history. But what about when the feed line
ruptures and the crews work for two weeks
with jackhammers outside the window dig-
ging it up? Why couldn’t they do it quietly
with a pick and shovel? Or at night? Or let us
do without heat? The contract doesn’t include
such possibilities.

The regents of the university are only trying
to help learning when they allocate ten million
dollars for the new service center. What does it
matter that those who have earned the money
or power for such positions have not read a
book since they left school?

You see, I am sure that the United Nations
is run by the B & G—debates cut off out of re-
spect for the schedule of a vacuum cleaner—
office styles made to conform to an engineer’s
wish to give you the best.

50

It’s easier on you students to learn these les-
sons while young. It will help the doctor later
to understand the functioning of the modern
hospital with a parking lot large enough to
cause panic and despair in even a healthy visi-
tor. It will help the ecologist adjust to the air-
ports where he finds he spends half his time on
the way to and from conferences on the
environment.

I recently heard from a student that at his
state university the administration doesn’t even
murmur about teachers advocating LSD and
other drugs, but one poor faculty member was
soon fired after he began explaining and dem-
onstrating how to alter the dormitory rooms.
Say what you want, but don’t get physical.

Perhaps the only escape is to join them your-
self—get your key ring, heavy shoes, and pre-
pare yourself for a life in the halls. Or, maybe
better, get upstream from the B&G. Draw up
the prints which they follow—manufacture the
equipment they manipulate. The problem
with this escape, which seems to promise a
more interesting career, is that this architec-
ture building too has its own B&G.

ROBERT HORVITZ

Some Mice

About mice. They are, in Robert
Horvitz’s words, “the essence of

_ mammalhood, the most concise

| statement of a personality—type that
_ can be seen running through our

_ whole portion of the animal king-

dom. Their behavioral repertoire is
so limited that, paradoxically, they
live on a mythic level: fratricide,
rape, invasion, exploration are the
daily stuff of life, and once one gets
used to the Lilliputian scale, their
epics are absolutely captivating. For
several years instead of watching
television, we'd sit around watching

_ the mice until early morning, fol-

lowing subplots and developing
emotional attachments.”

About Robert Horvitz. He pub-
lished this article originally ina New
York literary magazine called Big

_ Deal; Stewart reprinted it in the
Summer 1976 CQ. Thereafter Robert

was called cq’s “Art Editor,” which
meant he roved around the art world,
seeking potential contributors like
Donald Burgy (CQ printed his mock-
proposal to become a U.N. artist-

_ in-residence), Charles Ross (who
charted the sun burning a lens-am-

_ plified path across a series of boards),
_or Alex Grey (whose paintings, pho-

tographs and performance pieces
mingled horror and religious
beauty). Robert Horvitz only trav-
eled to the CQ offices once (for the
Jamboree). To the editors of the
magazine, he was a soft, persistent,
idea-filled voice on the phone—a
link with the East Coast. It was fit-
ting that he was also Whole Earth’s
expert on shortwave radio and radio
politics. (He writes a regular column
for the Review of International
Broadcasting.)

Art Kleiner

When our lease on the beach house was up, we
decided to divide the mouse colony: anyone
could take some mice with him when he left,
and any left over would be let go in the field
next door. I picked two, the extremes of the
litter. One was the bully, a handsome and ag-
gressive mouse named Brown. The other was
the runt. I named him God. God was black
and white, quite small and high-strung. He
was always hunched over in fear of being at-
tacked, as indeed he had been under attack by
other mice all his life, simply because he was
the smallest.

In their new cage, Brown immediately made
it clear to God that he would be allowed to live
only so long as he obeyed Brown’s wishes. He
cornered God and nipped at his balls and bit
him on the base of his spine until all the hair
there was gone. With no other mice around,
and food appearing effortlessly, Brown had
nothing else to do but manage God's existence.
He laid down an impossible code of behavior
and punished all infractions severely. God got
very thin because Brown punished him for eat-

51

Illustration by Robert Horvitz

Robert Horvitz

PU ThE Laby's i
TRAP LE Soe ve NEST :

TUNNEL
ENTRANCES
TO PENTAGON
AND NEST

Mazzy PAZm oot]

MESH ROOF

THE Laby's
NEST

Savane RING
(NO CONNECT) OW TO
MAZE)

MAZE

SHIT HOLE

TIN -CAN
NESTS

Se

of

PLEXIGLAS
WALLS

Food Bin NYLON STOCKING
(ENTRANCE TO ONE

TUNEL SYSTEM)

UNCLAIMED

FRESH -CuT NEST

GRASS

ing; his legs got stiff because Brown wouldn’t
let him run on their treadmill.

After a couple of weeks I bought two fe-
males at a pet store, hoping their presence
would lessen the tension between the two
males. One female died mysteriously her first
night in the cage. Both God and Brown were
fascinated with the one who survived, but
Brown became even more oppressive, attacking
God whenever she was nearby. The Lady was
a “waltzing mouse,” a breed with a peculiar
waddling walk. While Brown was away at the
food dish, God would sneak out from his cor-
ner to smell The Lady’s vagina, but she would
usually squeal and Brown would come rushing
over. God got so he could make a quick trip
out and back before either of the others knew
what had happened. Brown’s suspicions were
aroused by finding The Lady’s scent on God’s
whiskers and he began punishing God con-

2

stantly, just in case he had done something he
wasn’t supposed to, or in case he might have
been considering it.

Under this redoubled pressure, God could
not get to the food dish at all. After a week of
harassment and starvation, I intervened by
slipping food directly to him through the wire
mesh wall of the cage. He was afraid at first to
accept anything because he knew that Brown
would smell it on his breath and punish him.
But after a day or so he gave in to temptation.

This backfired. Brown seemed to get the
idea that God had found a way of conjuring up
food; thereafter he never left God’s side, hop-
ing to either catch him in the act of making
food or, better, get the food for himself.

The Lady had not lessened the tension be-
tween the males. The only other thing I could
think of was to isolate Brown for a few days to
allow God to recuperate from his life of routine
torture. I lured Brown into a wire mesh tunnel
with peanut butter and then barricaded the
tunnel.

God noticed Brown’s absence right away.
He stayed in his corner the whole first day,
afraid it was a trap. He smelled the air at inter-
vals, but wouldn’t move. The second day, he
moved around the cage cautiously, stopping to
check everything that smelled of Brown and
jumping at unexpected sounds. He ate a little
at the food dish. Then he discovered Brown be-
hind the barricade and ran back to his corner.
The third day, he went back to the barricade
and gnawed at it at length. (I could never fig-
ure out if he was trying to liberate Brown or
convince himself that he was safe from him.)
God spent the rest of the night trying to
mount The Lady. He had never had sex before
so he was quite a comical lover. On the fourth
day, God was noticeably more relaxed. His
new self-confidence showed in the way he let
his balls hang out under his tail. The social
standing of a male mouse can be gauged by
how prominently he displays his testicles: a
dominant male wears them proudly, extended,
one who is dominated wears his close in against
his belly. God groomed himself leisurely while
sitting at the ‘control point” in the center of
the tunnel system—which had previously been

|

Some Mice

reserved for Brown—and gained weight
quickly as he was free to eat for the first time
in over a month.

After four days, I thought their former pat-
tern of supremacy and submission had been
broken and they could begin anew as equals.
But as soon as I removed the barricade and let
Brown reenter the main chamber, they began
to fight. They were a surprisingly even match
and they fought until both were exhausted.
After a pause, the fight resumed and God was
clearly in charge. He went for the base of
Brown’s spine, sometimes biting his tail, and
they fought until exhausted again. At the end
of this round, Brown was either paralyzed or in
such pain that he could not move his hind legs.
God went back to his corner and the fighting

~ ended. There was hardly any blood on either of

them. Brown managed to pull himself back
into the tunnel he had been sequestered in ear-
lier and I replaced the barricade to protect him
from further attacks.

Brown’s rear legs were paralyzed, his penis
had been bitten off, and one eye had been
punctured. Two days after the fight, I saw him
struggling to pull himself up to the edge of
the water can. The fur on his belly, which had

_ always been brown, was turning dull gray. He
_ fell over on his side and could not get up. As I

watched, he went into convulsions, gasped si-
lently, relaxed, and died. I buried him outside.
It was peaceful in the cage until two weeks
after Brown’s death, when The Lady gave birth
to six rosy, hairless babies. God had never seen

| babies and had no idea what they were or what
| todo about them. He went into a state of

| panic, hopping around the cage, bumping into
| walls, and twitching like a squirrel. I later saw

him cowering at the end of a dead-end tunnel

| that was only used for urination. No mouse

willingly stays in the shit hole for very long,

| but God stayed there for three days. Eventu-
ally, I coaxed him out with food and he went
| back to The Lady and her brood.

Soon after The Lady’s first litter was born, I

| was given a year-old albino female who had not
| had any contact with other mice since earliest

childhood. Bess’s whole world consisted of

herself, her food, and her shoebox full of nest-

ing material which she sorted through and
rearranged every day. She was fat and splen-
didly spoiled by solitude.

God was as bewildered by her arrival in the
cage as Bess was to find herself there. The Lady
left her brood to come down to the main cham-
ber to meet her. After a few minutes of cau-
tious smelling and mutual uncertainty, Bess
had had enough of this new weirdness. She at-
tacked The Lady. She was twice the size of The
Lady, but very flabby and unskilled at fight-
ing. The Lady fought back and chased her into
a hole.

The fighting between the two females con-
tinued sporadically for weeks, but Bess had
time between fights to learn her way around
the main chamber. As she had no experience
with complicated spaces and was too heavy to
climb around the wire mesh walls, she was un-
able to find the entrances to the tunnels where
God and The Lady lived. After learning where
the food was and when it was safe to roam
around, she began to construct an elaborate
nest along the lines of her former one.

God began spending most of his time with
Bess. His own nest was overrun with infants
who kicked and squealed all day, competing
for the best suckling positions, and when The
Lady occasionally went downstairs to eat, he
was besieged by pups who refused to believe he
had no teats. So he moved out. The Lady was
hurt and jealous: when God returned to visit
her with Bess’s smell on his fur, she would
squeak bitterly and push him away.

Bess was only too happy to have God stay
with her. He had earned her endless gratitude
by introducing her to sex. Living alone she had
never suspected that anything like sex existed.
She had missed out on the rapes and adolescent
gang-bangs that soured most females on sex,
and, of all the mice I came to know, Bess was
the only one who relished it. The others merely
tolerated it. God and Bess had intercourse sev-
eral times a night and even that was not
enough to satisfy her.

It took Bess a month to find the tunnel that
went to the shit hole, as it was almost a foot
above the floor of the main chamber. A week
later she found the tunnel that went to The La-

53

Robert Horvitz

dy’s nest. As she entered the nest tunnel, The
Lady caught her scent. They confronted each
other near the entrance. Bess had the extreme
stupidity to attack. I tried to separate them
with a screwdriver but was unsuccessful. Bess
could not find her way out to safety and was
thus trapped deep within the territory of her
rival. By the time I managed to prod her along
the pathway back to the main chamber, she

54

was covered with blood and shaking with fear
and anger. This same scene occurred a few days
later and, to my knowledge, that was the last
time The Lady and Bess fought. Thereafter,
they left each other alone. Bess got pregnant
and, shortly after God was killed by one of The
Lady’s sons (whose father had been Brown), she
gave birth to seven babies of her own and dis-
covered the joys of motherhood.

I
]

URSULA LE GUIN

The Space Crone

| Ursula Le Guin I regard as the high-
est quality writer working with sci-

ence fiction since Kurt Vonnegut

_ moved on. Her books include The

| Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, The
| Left Hand of Darkness, Wizard of

| Earthsea, The Farthest Shore, The Lan-
| guage of the Night, and The Compass

_ Rose (a recent book of stories, one of
_ which CQ published in 1983).

When I told Margaret Mead that

__we were printing a piece by Ms. Le
| Guin which says that women start

getting really good after menopause,
Margaret snapped cordially, ‘‘She’s
talking about her mother.”

Ursula Le Guin’s mother was
Theodora Kroeber-Quinn, author of
Ishi in Two Worlds, wife of the emi-
nent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber
(and his biographer—A/fred Kroeber:
A Personal Configuration) and, at the
age of seventy-nine when this was
published (in the Summer 1976 CQ),
a stunning, gracious woman. She
died in 1979 (and left famous advice
on how to handle that in the poem
immediately following this article).
The poem has had a life of its own,
passing by word of mouth and copy
machine among the populations of
the bereaved. Countless people asked

Theo for copies, which she always
gladly supplied. I resisted printing
the poem until we needed it (the Fall
1979 CQ).

Stewart Brand

The menopause is probably the least glamor-
ous topic imaginable; and this is interesting,
because it is one of the very few topics to which
cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A
serious mention of menopause is usually met
with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it
is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the
silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indi-
cations of taboo.

Most people would consider the old phrase
“change of life” a euphemism for the medical
term “menopause,” but I, who am now going
through the change, begin to wonder if it isn’t
the other way round. “Change of life’ is too
blunt a phrase, too factual. “Menopause,” with
its chime-suggestion of a mere pause after
which things go on as before, is reassuringly
trivial.

But the change is not trivial, and I begin to
wonder how many women are brave enough to
carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their
reproductive capacity with more or less of a
struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s
all there is to it. Well, at least I don’t get the
Curse any more, they say, and the only reason
I felt so depressed sometimes was hormones.
Now I’m myself again. But this is to evade the
real challenge, and to lose, not only the capac-
ity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a
Crone.

In the old days women who survived long
enough to attain the menopause more often ac-
cepted the challenge. They had, after all, had

Be)

Ursula Le Guin

Theodora Kroeber

practice. They had already changed their life
radically once before, when they ceased to be
virgins and became mature women/wives/ma-
trons/mothers/mistresses/whores/etc. This
change involved not only the physiological al-
ternations of puberty—the shift from barren
childhood to fruitful maturity—but a socially
recognized alteration of being: a change of
condition from the sacred to the profane.

With the secularization of virginity now
complete, so that the once awesome term “‘vir-
gin” is now a sneer or at best a slightly dated
word for a person who hasn’t copulated yet, the
opportunity of gaining or regaining the dan-
gerous/sacred condition-of-being at the Second
Change has ceased to be apparent.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting
room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is
without significance. Old age is similarly a
waiting room, where you go after life’s over
and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years be-
fore and after the menstrual years are vestigial:
the only meaningful condition left to women is
that of fruitfulness. Curiously, this restriction
of significance coincided with the development
of chemicals and instruments which make fer-
tility itself a meaningless or at least secondary

56

characteristic of female maturity. The signifi-
cance of maturity now is not the capacity to
conceive but the mere ability to have sex. As
this ability is shared by pubescents and by post-
climacterics, the blurring of distinctions and
elimination of opportunities is almost com-
plete. There are no rites of passage, because
there is no significant change. The Triple God-
dess has only one face: Marilyn Monroe’s, may-
be. The entire life of a woman from ten or
twelve through seventy or eighty has become
secular, uniform, changeless. As there is no
longer any virtue in virginity, so there is no
longer any meaning in menopause. It requires
fanatical determination now to become a
Crone.

Women have thus, by imitating the life-
condition of men, surrendered a very strong
position of their own. Men are afraid of vir-
gins, but they have a cure for their own fear
and the virgin’s virginity: fucking. Men are
afraid of crones, so afraid of them that their
cure for virginity fails them; they know it
won't work. Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all
but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfal-
len and cockadroop.

Menopause Manor is not merely a defensive
stronghold, however. It is a house or house-
hold, fully furnished with the necessities of
life. In abandoning it, women have narrowed
their domain and impoverished their souls.
There are things the Old Woman can do, say,
and think which the Woman cannot do, say, or
think. The Woman has to give up more than
her menstrual periods before she can do, say, or
think them. She has got to change her life.

The nature of that change is now clearer
than it used to be. Old age is not virginity, but
a third and new condition; the virgin must be
celibate, but the crone need not. There was a
confusion there, which the separation of fe-
male sexuality from reproductive capacity, via
modern contraceptives, has cleared up. Loss of
fertility does not mean loss of desire and fulfill-
ment. But it does entail a change, a change in-
volving matters even more important—if I
may venture a heresy—than sex.

The woman who is willing to make that
change must become pregnant with herself, at

The Space Crone

last. She must bear herself, her third self, her
old age, with travail and alone. Not many will
help her with that birth. Certainly no male ob-
stetrician will time her contractions, inject her
with sedatives, stand ready with forceps, and
neatly stitch up the torn membranes. It’s hard
even to find an old-fashioned midwife, these
days. That pregnancy is long, that labor is
hard. Only one is harder, and that’s the final
one, the one which men also must suffer and
perform.

It may well be easier to die if you have al-
ready given birth to others or yourself, at least
once before. This would be an argument for
going through all the discomfort and embar-
rassment of becoming a Crone. Anyhow it
seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage
and to dodge it, evade it, and pretend nothing
has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s
womanhood, to pretend one’s like a man. Men,
once initiated, never get the second chance.
They never change again. That’s their loss,
not ours. Why borrow poverty?

Certainly the effort to remain unchanged,
young, when the body gives so impressive a
signal of change as the menopause, is gallant;
but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, bet-
ter befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of
| forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young
| and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the
_ Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-
| crowned, with human hearts.
| Ifa spaceship came by from the friendly na-
__ tives of the fourth planet of Altair, and the po-
| lite captain of the space ship said, “We have
_ room for one passenger; will you spare us a sin-
| gle human being, so that we may converse at
| leisure during the long trip back to Altair, and
| learn from an exemplary person the nature of
the race?” —I suppose what most people would
_ want to do is provide them with a fine, bright,
_ brave young man, highly educated and in peak
_ physical condition. A Russian cosmonaut
| would be ideal (American astronauts are
| mostly too old). There would surely be hun-

_ dreds, thousands of volunteers, just such

_ young men, all worthy. But I would not pick
_ any of them. Nor would I pick any of the

| young women who would volunteer, some out

of magnanimity and intellectual courage, oth-
ers out of a profound conviction that Altair
couldn’t possibly be any worse for a woman
than Earth is.

What I would do is go down to the local
Woolworth’s, or the local village marketplace,
and pick an old woman, over sixty, from be-
hind the costume jewelry counter or the betel-
nut booth. Her hair would not be red or
blonde or lustrous dark, her skin would not be
dewy fresh, she would not have the secret of
eternal youth. She might, however, show you a
small snapshot of her grandson, who is work-
ing in Nairobi. She is a bit vague about where
Nairobi is, but extremely proud of the grand-
son. She has worked hard at small, unimpor-
tant jobs all her life, jobs like cooking, clean-
ing, bringing up kids, selling little objects of
adornment or pleasure to other people. She was
a virgin once a long time ago, and then a sex-
ually potent fertile female, and then went
through menopause. She has given birth sev-
eral times and faced death several times—the
same times. She is facing the final birth/death
a little more nearly and clearly every day now.
Sometimes her feet hurt something terrible.
She never was educated to anything like her
capacity, and that is a shameful waste and a
crime against humanity, but so common a
crime should not and cannot be hidden from
Altair. And anyhow she’s not dumb. She has a
stock of sense, wit, patience, and experiential
shrewdness, which the Altaireans might, or
might not, perceive as wisdom. If they are
wiser than we, then of course we don’t know
how they’d perceive it. But if they are wiser
than we they may know how to perceive that
inmost mind and heart which we, working on
mere guess and hope, proclaim to be humane.
In any case, since they are curious and kindly,
let’s give them the best we have to give.

The trouble is, she will be very reluctant to
volunteer. “What would an old woman like me
do on Altair?” she’ll say. “You ought to send
one of those scientist men, they can talk to
those funny-looking green people. Maybe Dr.
Kissinger should go. What about sending the
Shaman?” It will be very hard to explain to her
that we want her to go because only a person

By

Ursula Le Guin

who has experienced, accepted, and acted the
entire human condition—the essential quality
of which is Change—can fairly represent hu-
manity. “Me?” she'll say, just a trifle slyly.
“But I never did anything.”

But it won't wash. She knows, though she

58

won't admit it, that Dr. Kissinger has not
gone and will never go where she has gone,
that the scientists and the shamans have not
done what she has done. Into the space ship,
Granny.

THEODORA KROEBER-QUINN

Poem for the Living

When I am dead

Cry for mea little.

Think of me sometimes

But not too much.

It is not good for you

Or your wife or your husband
Or your children

To allow your thoughts to dwell
Too long on the Dead.

Think of me now and again

As I was in life

At some moment it ts pleasant to recall.
But not for long.
Leave me in peace

_ As I shall leave you, too, in peace.

While you live

_ Let your thoughts be with the Living.

a2

RON JONES

Winning

Ron Jones teaches and writes amaz-
ing but true stories about teaching
and learning. CQ published several
of those stories; Norman Lear later
filmed one of them (“Take As Di-
rected,” about a classroom experi-
ment that demonstrated a little too
well how well-meaning, ordinary
people could become Nazis). Like
that story, which was reprinted in
the Next Whole Earth Catalog, this
one took place in Cubberly High
School in Palo Alto, California, in
1969. It appeared in the Summer
1976 CQ.

Where are the characters now?

Huey Williams, Ron heard, is a tele-
phone lineman—“another of my stu-

dents saw this crew of people com-
ing into a restaurant, and there

was Huey, still with an exuberant
smile. . . .’ Chris Martin works as
an English teacher. Ron Jones is the
physical fitness director at the San
Francisco Recreation Center for the
Handicapped, where he coaches the
basketball team. “Our team has been
undefeated for the last four years, be-
cause we've learned the fundamental
art of cheating. Our scorekeeper can-
not keep score; our players often hug
their opponents, which disarms

60

them tremendously; we shoot at the
wrong baskets; and we trade our
players in the middle of the game.”
This story is partly about how Ron
discovered that last technique.

Art Kleiner

All basketball coaches hope to encounter a
“benny” somewhere in their coaching careers.
A benny is one of those special kids that come
along once ina lifetime. A kid that won't leave
the gym until you’ve turned out the lights and
locked the door. And after it’s locked, will
have fourteen ways and nine friends ready to
reenter. They possess all the natural skills and
instincts of great players. A desire to work
hard perfecting the most elementary moves.
And work even harder to help their teammates
experience success. Perhaps that’s the invisible
quality that makes a benny. The unselfish will-
ingness to share the art of basketball with any-
one who cares to listen or participate in the
game. Whatever that spirit is, it’s the quality
each coach looks for. It’s the thing to build
around and learn from. It’s a winning season
and perhaps a lot more.

At Cubberly High School in Palo Alto,
where I was basketball coach, the presence of a
benny was extremely unlikely. The students at
Cubberly were white middle-class children of
professionally oriented parents. For the most
part, these kids mirrored their parents. They
were striving to become successful at some-
thing; what that something might be was
never made clear. Without an objective in
mind, the striving became all-important. At
Cubberly it meant getting in “advanced abil-
ity” groups, getting good grades, getting ac-
cepted into a good university. Getting ahead.

Getting through school. Getting. There was
little time for intensity or giving to any one
thing, especially a sport.

By a strange series of events it turned out I
was wrong about ever finding a benny at Cub-
berly. It started when school integration came
to Palo Alto. Black students volunteered to
be bused across the freeway tracks. Cubberly
High School as “host” school received its allot-
ment of twenty-three “guest” students. As the
basketball coach I waited anxiously to see if
any athletes might be a part of this transfer. Of
course I was looking for a benny. Three days
after the transfer students arrived I called the
first basketball practice.

The turnout was excellent. Our basketball
program had been successful during the past
few years and it gradually became known that
if you turned out, you would get a chance to
play. The prospect of gaining some new play-
ers from Ravenswood High School in East Palo
Alto added to the tension and excitement of
the first practice.

As the players came out on the floor for the
first time I noted some familiar kids who had
started on last year’s team. In fluid movement
they began the slow and graceful art of shoot-
ing their favorite shots. Dribbling a few steps
and rearing up to take another shot. Rebound-
ing and passing out to a fellow player. Reliving
past plays. Moving to the fantasy of future
game-winning shots. Eyeing the new players.

At the baskets on each side of the central
court the new players are assembled. They
dribble the available basketballs in place and
watch the players moving on the center court.
They don’t talk much and look a little fright-
ened. Then as if on cue they begin to turn and
shoot at the available baskets. They too have a
private shot and a move to the basket. Soon the
entire gym is alive with players outwitting in-
visible foes and arcing up game-winning shots.
Another season is beginning.

Midway into this first practice Cubberly
High School basketball met Huey Williams.
He came rushing into the gym. In fact he ran
around the entire court three times. He didn’t

_ have a basketball. He was just running. And
_ smiling. Nodding his head to the dumbstruck

Winning

players. He didn’t speak a word. Just smiled
and nodded hello. By his third lap, everyone
knew we had our first black athlete.

Huey Williams wasn’t exactly the transfer
student coaches dream about. He was short,
about the shortest player on the club. With
stocky frame and bowed legs and radar-like
hair, he seemed like a bottle of soda water, al-
ways about to pop. His shots were explosions
of energy that pushed the ball like a pellet.
When he ran, he couldn’t stop. He’d race in
for a layup and instead of gathering his mo-
mentum and softly placing the ball against the
backboard, he raced straight ahead, full speed,
ejecting the ball in midair flight like a plane
letting go a rocket. The ball usually slammed
against the backboard or rim and careened
across the gym. To say it simply, Huey was not
a basketball player. He was something else.

Every player carries to the game a personal-
ity. That’s part of what makes basketball so in-
teresting. That personality is directly reflected
in the way a person plays. Now, Huey brought
with him a personality I had never quite seen
before. He loved life, people, school, anything
and everything. “Mr. Jones, how are you to-
day?” he’d say. “Fine I hope.” You would have
to agree with Huey. His view of the world was
contagious. He always had a smile that burst
out when you least expected. “Mr. Jones, I
didn’t shoot too well did I?” He’d be smiling,
getting ready to shoot again.

As the first black player on our team, Huey
was well received. After all, he didn’t represent
a threat to any of the white players. If any-
thing he was a puzzlement. How could anyone
try so hard, smile so much, and play so bad?
Weren’t all blacks supposed to be super ath-
letes? How come he doesn’t know his place,
isn’t solemn, and I like him? You couldn’t help
but root for Huey and want to be around him.
Carnegie and the make-you-feel-good folks
coud take lessons from Huey. He was a good
human being who shared his optimism about
life with anyone who ventured in his path.
With a smile Huey started every practice with
“We're going to win this whole thing, Mr.
Jones. Just watch!”

I didn’t share Huey’s enthusiasm. It was the

61

Ron Jones

Top row: S. Lee, J. Scholer, D. Warnock, P. Traynor, P. Keplinger, G. Morton, S. Chenn, B. Stanovic.
Bottom row: J. Mottsmith, T. Trish, H. Williams, K. Flattely, R. Buckley, T. McCrea.

The 1969 Cubberly High “B” team. Centerpiece, Huey Williams. Chris Martin is absent posing with the
varsity. The “D. Warnock” is Doug, brother of Dave.

most unusual group of kids I had ever coached.
In fact the team really constituted three dis-
tinct groups. Huey represented one of these
groups. This was a collection of five kids who
had never played before. They couldn’t shoot
or dribble, let alone jump. Passing was iffy.
When they were on the court my greatest fear
was that they might run into each other. Al-
though lacking skill, they personified Huey’s
faith and willingness to work hard. My God
how they tried.

A second group of kids on the team had all
played together the past year. They were typi-
cal Palo Alto kids. I guess Chris Martin most
exemplified the personality of this group.
Chris was a class officer, good student, achieve-
ment oriented, and serious about winning and
of course playing. Chris just tolerated Huey
and most everything else. His attention was on
the future. Basketball at Cubberly was like the
Pony League, Little League, and Junior League

62

he had participated in so well. It was one more
right step to some mythical big league called
Farah, Hilton, or perhaps Standard Oil.

Chris knew all the lessons and skills of bas-
ketball. His jump shot was a picturebook ex-
ample of perfection. He released the ball at the
peak of his jump and followed through with
his hands guiding the path of the ball as it slid
into the basket. The closest parallel to Chris’
behavior might be described as that of a little
old man. He was “‘finicky”’ at the age of six-
teen. If things weren’t just right, his voice
would stretch several octaves and literally
squeak. For Chris things going just right
meant a championship and of course a star
role. I liked and felt sorry for Chris all at the
same time. He reminded me of myself. A little
selfish and awfully conceited. Extremely insu-
lated from feelings.

A third group of kids making up the team
can best be described as outlaws. Dave War-

Winning

nock characterized this group. Whereas Huey
had a reverence for life and Chris was busy con-
trolling life, Dave seemed always on guard and
challenging hell out of it. He was always in
trouble. Usually a team is composed of kids
like Huey who can’t play and kids like Chris
who have played throughout childhood. Kids
like Dave rarely show up on a team. To have
five kids like him on the same team was most
unusual. If not intolerable.

Dave’s style of life and play was outside pre-
diction. Dave reminded me of a stork trying to
play basketball. His arms and legs flayed at the
air as he stormed up and down the court. His
shots were what players call “watch shots.” He
would crank up the ball without facing the
basket from some unexpected place and yes it
would go right in. Prompting the defensive
player to say, “Look in the other hand. . . you
might find a watch.” Dave was always a sur-
prise. A surprise if he showed up for practice
and a surprise that he stayed with it. Ina
strange way he was also a breath of fresh air.
He lived to the fullest. He didn’t stop to ex-
plain his actions. He just acted.

So there you have it. Not exactly a dream
team. Five kids charging around looking for
the pass they just dropped. Five kids straining
for an expected championship. And five kids
who might not even show up for the game.
The entire team tilted on the verge of combus-
tion. The kids that centered around Chris and
Dave openly hated each other. Huey and his
troop of warriors became the grease that kept
the team moving together. Happy and de-
lighted to be playing, they were oblivious to
the conflict. In their constant attempt to
mimic a Warnock pass or a Chris jump shot
they inevitably made the originals look ridicu-
lous. Huey with his intensity and honesty put
everything in perspective. It was simply im-
possible to get angry or serious about yourself
with Huey around. He had girlfriends to tell
you about, a cheer for a good play, a hand for
someone who had fallen, and a smile for every-
thing. And if all that failed, he always had his
“new shot” to show you.

It wasn’t long before everyone was working
to help Huey and the other inexperienced play-

Chris Martin, head of “The A-Train.”

ers. Chris was telling players about the right
way to shoot. Dave was displaying one of his
new trick passes. I was working hard to teach
defense. If you don’t have the ball, go get it.
Don’t wait for someone to put it through the
basket or even start a play. Go get the ball.
Chase it. Surround it. Take it.

We worked on how to press and trap a player
with the ball. How to contest the inbound
pass. Double team. Use the full court. Cut off

63

Ron Jones

the passing lane. Work together with team-
mates to break over screens and sag into a help
position. Work to keep midpoint vision. Block
out. Experience the feeling of achievement
without having the ball or scoring the winning
point. Taking pride in defense.

The intensity and intricate working of de-
fense was something everyone on the team
could do, and something new for everyone to
learn. Defense is something most basketball
teams just do not concentrate on. It’s the un-
seen part of the game. Working hard on the
techniques of team defense began to slowly
draw the team together with a common experi-
ence. As for offense, well, I taught the basic
passing pattern, but the shooting was up to
whoever was on the court. Chris and his group
ran intricate patterns for the layup or percent-
age shot. Dave with his team took the ball to
the hoop usually after three dribbles and a con-
federate yell. Huey’s team did their best just to
get the ball up the court.

By the start of the season we had one spec-
tacular defense and three offenses. In fact I di-
vided the team into the three distinct groups.
In this way everyone could play. It confused
the heck out of opponents. According to bas-
ketball etiquette you're supposed to play your
best five players. We played our best fifteen.
You are also supposed to concentrate on scor-
ing. We emphasized defense. Finally a good
team has the mark of consistency. We were the
most inconsistent team you could imagine.

We would start each game with Huey’s
bunch. They called themselves “the Rever-
ends.” With their tenacity for losing the ball
and swarming after it plus their complete in-
ability to shoot, they immobilized their oppo-
nents. The starting fives they encountered
couldn’t believe the intensity and madcaps of
Huey’s Reverends. By the time they realized
they were playing against all heart and very
little scoring potential it was time to send in
Chris’ group. Chris’ team called themselves the
“A-Train.”’ That they were. Like a train they
methodically moved down the floor, executed a
series of crisp passes, and scored. By this time
in the game Huey was smiling his all-knowing
smile, and the coach from the other team was

64

Dave Warnock, head of ‘““The G-Strings.”

usually looking over at our bench in a state of
confusion. Just as the other team adjusted to
systematic and disciplined play, we sent in
Dave’s “G-Strings.” Dave’s team played with
reckless abandon. They were always in places
they weren’t supposed to be. Doing things that
weren't in the book. Playing their game.

By the middle of the season we were unde-
feated. Oh, I had to suspend Dave twice for
smoking a cigar in the locker room, once for
smuggling a girl onto the travel bus. And on
occasion I had to remind Chris that I was the
coach, not he. But all in all the teammates
were actually becoming friends. It was a joy to
witness this chemistry. Huey’s group gradually
improved. They started believing they could
beat anyone. The basketball still didn’t go in
the basket, but in their minds and actions they
were “starters.” As for Chris, he was actually
beginning to yell for someone besides himself.
And Dave, well he didn’t change much in an
outward way. He was still frantic on the bas-
ketball court. It was off the court that he was
becoming a little less defensive. He started

telling me of things he wanted in life. Things
not that much different from those securities
and accomplishments sought by others. In fact
it was something as simple as friendship.

Our first defeat of the year came not on the
basketball court but at the hands of the school
superintendent. With twelve games already
played, the superintendent declared that all
transfer students were ineligible for interscho-
lastic sports. It was a knee-jerk reaction to
other coaches in the league who feared we
might “raid” Ravenswood High School of its
top black atheletes. No one worried about us
stealing away their intelligent students or class
leaders, yet that’s just what we did. No one
thought to ask the students and parents about
how they felt. This was a coaches’ decision.
Coaches who thought only about winning.

The superintendent ordered Huey off the
team immediately. The announcement of this
decision came not in a telephone call or per-
sonal visit, but in a ten-word directive. “No
transfer students will be eligible for interscho-
lastic athletic teams.”

The announcement came on a game day.
The team was already suited up waiting for
the last-minute game plan. I read the superin-
tendent’s decision to the team. They were
stunned. And angry. Ideas and plots for Huey’s
survival rang out against the white-tiled dress-
ing room walls. Dave slammed his shoe against
a locker, “It’s a shitty decision.” Chris agreed,
“We can appeal. . . let’s go to the board of
education.”’ Dave snapped, “When. . . in
three weeks?” Everyone joined the argument.
“Let’s give Huey a new number.” “Yeah, but
can we also change his color?” ‘““We can play
against ourself . . . can’t we?” “Let’s make up
our own league.” In the din my own thoughts
were welling up. How I hated the way deci-
sions were made at this school.

It happened every day in a hundred ways.
The textbook to use, the schedule to follow,
the course to teach. At no point in the school-
ing process was the teacher or student allowed
to make a decision and then be responsible for
it. Every day I and those around me were being
robbed of the chance to make decisions. It was
like a draining away of life itself. Life must be

Winning

tended daily. It can’t be simply studied. Or
mandated. Like basketball it must be played
the best way you know how. What do we teach
when all we do is hand down and follow
directives?

My thoughts were obviously slipping out of
my mouth. I didn’t know when I started ver-
balizing my feelings, but I became aware of it
as my whispers all of a sudden were audible in
the now silent locker room. As my personal de-
cision became clearer so did my pronounce-
ment of it. ““Huey’s dismissal is wrong. It’s un-
fair to defer the decision or obey it. I think we
should forfeit all our remaining games. Huey
is a part of this team. If you are willing to give
other teams an automatic win over us in ex-
change for having Huey play. . . raise your
hand.” Fifteen players leaped to their feet.
Dave was yelling, “Well, all right then, we've
got a game to play!” It was unanimous.

The players streamed onto the floor to begin
their warmup. I could hear a few rebel yells
and even that high-pitched squeak of Chris’.
Huey still brought gasps of surprise with his
high velocity layup. When he did his latest
new shot, a sweeping, running hook, the as-
sembled fans roared approval. Huey grinned
and promised more. As the players finished
their warmup, the school principal came by to
remind me of the superintendent’s decision.
“Ron,” he said, “I’m sorry about Huey, but he
hasn’t scored many points for you has he?”
“No,” I replied, “Huey hasn’t scored a point.”
“Things will be different next year,’ he con-
fided. I agreed.

As the game was about to start, the team
huddled for final instructions. “Any after-
thoughts?” I asked. “There is still time.” We
were all bundled together in a knot. Hands
thrust together in a tight clasp. Everyone
looked up. Eyes all met. Every single kid was
smiling. My God, I’ve got fifteen Hueys.

The horn sounded calling for the game to
start. I took the entire team to the scoring desk
and informed the league official. ‘““We formally
forfeit this game.”’ The opposing coach from
Gunn High School rushed over to see what the
commotion was about. “What are you doing?”
he asked. I told him of our decision. “That

65

Ron Jones

doesn’t make sense. You guys are undefeated,”
he stammered. “We let two of our players go
today.” “It’s our decision,” I explained. “We're
here to play basketball, all of us.”

And we did. All of us. Huey did his pat-
ented dash, Chris his jump shot while Dave re-
lied on surprise. It was a combination hard to
beat. We poured in twenty more points than
Gunn and, more importantly, displayed a con-
stant hustle. Players ran to shoot free throws.
Ran to take a place in the game. Ran off the
floor on being replaced. It reminded me of that
first practice with this strange kid running
around the gym. Perhaps we had learned more
from Huey than we taught. At the close of the
game the Gunn coach stopped to comment,
“Congratulations, you've got quite a team
there.”’ I reminded him that we had forfeited
the game, that his team had won. He turned,
“No, your kids won. They’re a bunch of
bennys.”

Dave Warnock was dead. Chris brought the
message to me. His father was a school official
and he heard the news from the police. Dave
had been at a party and suffocated inhaling hair
spray. Like a tape recorder erasing its content |
couldn’t think or act. Then in forced flashes I
began to retread the past days. Searching for
glimpses of Dave. His face. His antics. Was
there something there? A warning? A plea?
What did I miss?

The school community for the most part re-
mained ignorant of Dave’s death and its self-
destructive cause. There were faculty mur-
murs, “That crazy kid.” Other than side
glances at what had happened there was no
marking of Dave’s death. Drugs and death are
not part of the curriculum. It was improper to
alarm parents. The school didn’t stop its pa-
rade. Even for a moment of respect or some
such other platitude. Nothing. Everything as
usual. Including basketball.

The team gathered for practice out of habit.
The season actually had only a few days left. It
had been a corrugated course. Our protest to
allow Huey the right to play had sparked a
boycott of all team sports. The boycott led toa

66

Ron Jones, coach and history teacher.

change in the rules allowing transfer students
to play with the condition that “due to the dis-
ruptions’ no league championship would be
awarded. It was OK with us. We declared our-
selves champions. Actually it was Dave’s idea.
Oh shit, it didn’t seem fair. Dave was a storm.
He kicked and dared the world. And lost. Or
did he? I don’t know.

One good thing about sports is that you can
lose yourself in physical exertion. Push your-
self into fatigue. Let the body take over the
crying in the brain. I informed the team that
this would be our last practice. We would have
a game, full court scrimmage.

It was then that I realized Dave wasn’t
there. It’s funny, Dave was dead yet I expected
him to come prancing into the gym, the final
trick on death itself.

Being short one player I joined in the scrim-
mage. First Chris’ bunch against Huey’s team
and then Dave’s group to play Chris’. I stood in
for Dave. The play was strangely conservative
and sluggish. Perhaps this measured play was
in deference to Dave. Were we all letting our
thoughts wander? Just doing mechanical
steps? Or was it a subconscious statement that

Winning

Dave’s life was errant and not to be emulated?
Whatever, the play moved from one end of the
gym to the other like the arm of a ticking
clock. Up and down the floor.

It was Chris who broke the rhythm and si-
lence. Without warning he sliced across the
floor, stole a pass, dribbled the length of the
court and slam dunked. Then in an unexpected
leap he stole the inbound pass. Taking the ball
in one hand he pivoted up a crazy sweeping
hook shot. It was a “watch shot” if I’d ever
seen one. Out of the blue as the ball cut
through the net Christ erupted with a shrill
guttural yell that pierced the stillness. It was a
signal. The game tempo picked up and became
frantic. Everyone pushed to his maximum.
Straining for that extra effort. Hawking the
ball. Diving for a loose ball. Blowing tension.
Playing with relaxed abandon.

It felt wonderful. The game was fierce.
Everything learned in years of play was used.
New moves were tried. I crashed for a rebound,
dived, elbows flying after a loose ball and got
it. Sprinted full tilt on a fast break. Yelled full
voice as I fed Huey with a behind-the-back
pass that he laid up for two. Everyone is mov-
ing as if driven by some accelerating spell of
power and will. Everything goes in. We can
play forever. Play Forever.

The scrimmage raged on. The afternoon be-
came evening and still we played. The gym

| glowed in the yellow light, warm and wet. We

were racing now back and forth. Exploding for
shots. Playing the toughest defense. Jumping
over a screen. Blocking out. Back for one more
sensation of excellence.

My chest heaved for relief. Body throbbed.

_ Icouldn’t stop playing. And didn’t want to.

Didn’t Want To. Down the court. Set up.
That’s it. Feed the cutter. Fantastic. Now the
defense. Keep low. Fuck no. Take it away.
That’s it. Steal the goddamn ball. Now go.
Fly.

In a heap I collapsed. Legs simply buckled.
I was shaking. Head not able to move. In slow
motion the team centered around my crumpled
form. I’m all right. The air is rushing back
into an empty body. Giving life and move-
ment. ‘I’m all right.” Everyone is breathing
hard, pushing out air and taking it back in.
Grabbing their knees and doubling over. Let-
ting the body know it can rest.

Without any words everyone gathered
themselves, then silently headed for the locker
room and home. It’s over. The scrimmage was
ended. Practice finished. The season complete.

I slowly shower and dress, waiting for the
locker room to empty. Walking through the
silenced place I stop to look and say goodbye.
There is Chris’ locker. A good kid. Hope his
life goes well. He has changed and matured.
Been a part of other lives. Huey’s locker is still
open. God, even his locker has a smile. What a
person. I'll never forget. Dave’s place. The ci-
gar smoke is missing and so is Dave. I hate you
for leaving us. I love you.

I push up a twenty-five foot jump shot that
is five feet beyond my range. It goes in. Rush
to chase the ball. Try again. Seek the magnifi-
cent feeling of doing the undone. The un-
planned. The unexpected.

There is a sign that hangs over the exit from
the locker room. It reads, ““There is No Substi-
tute For Winning.” Someone scratched out the
word “winning” and replaced it. “There Is No
Substitute For Madness.”

67

RAYMOND DASMANN
Biogeographical

Provinces

“T had been hearing for years from
Peter Berg, Gary Snyder, and Huey
Johnson about Ray Dasmann’s phi-
losophy and research on biological
‘provinces’ and the fundamental ef-
fect on political thinking which they
might have,” wrote Steward Brand
in the original introduction to this
map and article (Fall 1976). Stewart
arranged for the rough sketches
(done by geographer Miklos
Udvardy) of what Dasmann origi-
nally called “Biotic Provinces” to
be reworked into a world map.
(Udvardy renamed them “Biogeo-
graphic Provinces.’’) The map was
drawn by cartographer/painter/
sculptor Theodore Oberlander, who
also “teaches and researches primar-
ily in geomorphology at U.C. Berke-
ley.” The result, reproduced here in
black-and-white, was published by
COEVOLUTION in full color—the
first world map of boundaries not
created by people.

Stewart introduced Raymond
Dasmann that issue by noting that
his writing and teaching has “long
had a powerful, quiet influence on

68

the environmental movement.” In
the same issue, Peter Warshall re-
viewed Dasmann’s college textbook,
Environmental Conservation (Wiley,
1959, 1976) under the title “Hom-
age to Dasmann.” Environmental Con-
servation is a manual for ecological
understanding, care and repair; it
describes day-to-day technique and
practice, in context of specific re-
gions and habitats, while, in Peter’s
words, “simultaneously yearning for
humans to change and see and gain
loving guidance for the Planet.”

At the time he developed this es-
say, Dasmann was senior ecologist at
the International Union for the Con-
servation of Nature at Morges, Swit-
zerland (Udvardy was a geographer
at the IUCN). Now Dasmann ts pro-
fessor of Environmental Studies at
the University of California, Santa
Cruz. The concept, meanwhile, of
biogeographic provinces has been
picked up by government agencies
and environmental groups around
the world. The U.S. National Park
Service, for instance. The full-color
Biogeographic map is available for
$5 postpaid from the Whole Earth
Access Company, 2990 Seventh
Street, Berkeley, CA 94710. Report-
edly, UNESCO is publishing a
newer version.

Art Kleiner

Is there any reason to produce a new classifica-
tion for a natural world that has already been
classified and reclassified by numbers of ecolo-

Biogeographical Provinces

gists and geographers? Why draw lines ona
map and say that the areas enclosed are to be
called biogeographic provinces? Do these have
any meaning in reality? To answer these ques-
tions I'll start by saying that I was drawn into
the mapping game by the demands of conser-
vation. In the IUCN (International Union
for Conservation of Nature and Natural Re-
sources) headquarters in Morges, Switzerland,
we wanted to know the extent to which the
various communities of wildlife were being
protected by existing national parks, reserves,
or other protected areas. From this we could
determine those areas most badly in need of
conservation and establish some priorities for
action.

Examination of existing systems of classifi-
cation revealed inadequacies. Plant ecologists
had developed many systems based on taxon-
omic relationships of plants, or upon the ap-
pearance or ecological characteristics of vegeta-
tion. These did not, however, take animals
into account, and we were concerned with pro-
tecting the greatest array of animal and plant
species.

In North America, early in this century, the
plant ecologist Frederick Clements joined with
the animal ecologist Victor Shelford to produce
the biome system of classification.’ Biomes are
easily recognized, they are the obvious subdivi-

_ sions of the world’s biota—the desert, grass-

land, coniferous forest, tropical rain forest, and
such. They are characterized by one prevailing

_ dominant form of “climax” vegetation, mean-

ing that which will develop if nature is allowed

| to take her course over a few centuries, without
| human interference. The prevailing climate

| shapes the climax vegetation along with the

_ soils and associated animal life.

The biome system of classification has now

| been widely accepted and has been the basis

_ of many international research programs, but

| for conservation purposes it does not go far

| enough. For temperate and arctic North Amer-
_ ica, Clements and Shelford did a reasonably

_ thorough job of subdividing biomes into asso-
| ciations and smaller units of classification.

_ These could have been the basis for a conserva-
_ tion-oriented system. But the challenge was

not picked up on other continents, and there
only the larger units are recognized.

It began to appear inevitable to us in IUCN
that if we wanted a global system that would
take into account not only vegetation, but also
plant and animal species distribution, we
would have to do more work, starting from
whatever system seemed the most promising.
This then became a task for IUCN’s Commis-
sion on Ecology, with the job of preparing
drafts and sketch maps largely falling into my
hands. After several preliminary publications,
the principal work was passed over to a bio-
geographer, Professor Miklos Udvardy, of Sac-
ramento State University. He has produced the
maps which form the basis for what is pre-
sented here.”

The scheme of classification that we devel-
oped was not really new. In the 1940s the dzotic
provinces of North America were mapped by
Lee R. Dice of the University of Michigan.
Like other American schemes, however, this
one was not adopted in other countries. Never-
theless it seemed a good basis on which to
work, taking into account as it did the distri-
bution of both plant and animal species. The
IUCN task was to extend the biotic province
system to the entire world, and this was done
in a preliminary way, recognizing that our
knowledge of many areas was inadequate.
Udvardy, however, pointed out that the term
biotic province had become, through usage, al-
most synonymous with faunal province, and
plants had been forgotten. He proposed the
new term biogeographic province, which has yet
to be corrupted.

It can be said that biogeographic provinces
are simply subdivisions of biomes, based on
animal and plant distribution. To a degree that
is true, but we have freed ourselves from the
question of what is, or is not, the true climax
vegetation which is involved in the Clements-
Shelford system. Essentially biotic provinces
are areas that differ considerably, either in their
animal or plant species, or in the character of
their vegetation, from one another. To illus-
trate the concept, I will use the example of
California, since it is the area I know best. The
state includes all or part of five biotic prov-

69

Raymond Dasmann

<x

NEOTROPICAL REALM

t. Campychson

2. Rowmanian

3. Colombian Cosstat

4, Guyanon

5S. Amazonian

&. Meotowan

7, Serco da Mor

B. Brazition Ruinbsxost

8. Brazdisn Planato

1G. Yardivion Forsst

42. Chifean Nnthetagua

1. Everglades

12. Sinsdoan

4, GQuemwao

YS. Yurateror

%6. Central Amycacor

47. Yaorzugtan Osy Forest
3B. Venezekor Deckueus Porest
48. Equadorian Ory Forrat
2. Coxtings

Rt. Gran Choco

22. Chttean S&raocaia Forest

20. Campos Limpos

“28. Bavecu

30. Campos Cercoctos
31. Argontinian Pampas

SR. Ue Parmipas
23. Nathesn Anders
Colombian Montane
Yurgos

. Pune

Souther Andon

. Babxows- Bermudkin

. Cuban

. Groater Antifiea«n
reser Ansitean

. RexiRo Gigedo isand
. Cavor hylnor

. Qohpegos islants

. Femmnda de Noronp Idtord
. Savth Troridade isiand
Loke Tisicace

SEXLEBLBSESERE

a2

FTrapical Humid Forests

328

Subtropical and Temperate Rainfareata ac Woodlands

Temperate Broad-feat Farests or Woodlands
and Seepofsr Beciducaus Thickels

POA eoHon~

20.

WORLD

NEAAETIC REALM

Sitkan
Qcegonion
Yikon Toiga
Canadian Taigo

. Eostorn Foreat

Aystapaian
Catiorman

. Sonoran
s Crhuohoan

Tamuutipan

- Great Basin

. Alegiicor lehanda

» Alaskan Tondra

. Canadian Tuntro

_ Acohc Archipelags

. Greentand Tondsr

. Arctic Desert ant icecap
. Aroxetands

. Rocky Mountwre

Sietra-Cascorto

Zt, Madrean-Cordiiieron

22.

Greof Lakox

as

46

¢

AFAOTROPICAL REAL)

+, Guinean Aaintocoss
2. Congo Rainforest

&, South Afric Waodian
2. Malagasy Woortand “So
20. Malagaey Baia

17. Konao
46, Etniopion Highionds:
Quinean Righfands

20. Ceorrat Atrican Mghtw
21. East Abican Highlands
32. South Atricor bightoret
23. Ascension and SH, Hete
ZA. Comores ishords snd A
Bh. Mascarone felortis

2S. Laks Rudolf

27. Lowe Ukerewe f¥ictorix)
RE. Lake Tongonrgies

29. Lake Mafaw! (Nyossa)

: Evergreen Sclerophyticus Forests. Scrub, of Woe

S$
NS Tropica} Ory of Deciduous Farests inci, Monsoon

or Woodland

A reduced black and white photo of the map of World Biogeographical Provinces.

70

Tropica} Graasiands and Savannas

Biogeographical Provinces

INDOMALAYAN REALM

- Molonar Rojntorest
Ceylonese Azontrrest

Bengakan Ragrorest

Burman Raintorest

indactines® Reintorest

Sauth Chinesr Reihforest
Motsyan Rainforest

indus-Ganges Moneson Fuces

. Burma Monsxoan Forest

. Thallandian Monsovo Forest
Mohartadisn

. Coromandel

43. Ceyloness Monsomm Foret

44. Boctan Thorn Forest

35. Trac Desort

18. Seychettes xunct Ambantes tefands
17. Loctedives tatandy

18. Raidivos ard Chayos tsbiatts

19. Coros- Kenting and Chrigimus Kionds
20. Ansiaman and Nwoba tetands

RY, Sumatra

RR. dave

23. Losesr Sando istords

A. Gelotres

25. Bamen

28. Philippines

27. Saowrn

Biscarvownap~

Ba
: Temperate Grasslands

Warm Deserts and Semidesests

Cold- winter {continental) Deserts and Semideserts

Tundra Communities and Barren Asctic Deserts

AUSTRAUAN REALM

Queernsiand Coastof
. Texmonomn

Northern Coxstas

» Western SReORn
. Saofrorn Scteropl ik
. Esalarn Soterophy!

. Arigaiow

. Basie Muigz

. Contrat Orcert

IQ. Southern Mutya Sosttrusk

YS. Northern Savanna

12. Northen Grasisnda

13. Eastern Grasslands and Sa¥annas

OAVHRSEN

y)
LEE

5

SS

Mixed {stand Systems

: Lake Systems

Bay

. Cdinrse Sublrapicas Forust

- Kort Sikarian Yaigo

Bis carnmxnwns

. Pononorsn

» West Anwdndior :

. Usnchu- Japanese Mord Fares}
- OricoNot Deciduess Forest

. Derata Hiydtsnds

» Mediterraneso Bdemphyt!

. Sabor

. Aconino Devers

» Toxla-aksr- Gott Desert
. Testor

. harten Reset

. Arctic. Overt

a Righante Tundra

» Afas Stappe

. Portion Steppe

» Seottieh Mightaacts

Subss BREE eERIERE

- Lake Borat

PALAEAACTIC REALM

Japanuse Bvergresn forse!
West Eurasion Taiyo

teekoxtioy

Suborctir: Roxdwaods
Kamchatkan

Binet iatands

Agents

Boreonsmount

Middle Europeccr Forext

Anatokan-ixoran Oesert
Turanian

Lowarrtic Funda

Mongokon-Manhchurisn Steppe

Contra Europsan Hightoroie
Bute Highlands

Caucaso- town Raonends
Attar Highiands

Pamir Tis): Shan Kighorate
Hinde Kush Rigblsads
Him@ayan Hightiods
Szotbwen Highlands
Mocaconesion teands

OCEARIAN REALM

Mixed Mountain ard Highland Systems with Camptex Zonatian

ANYASCTIC REALE

» Neozeatangio

« Macdhend ts

. Meoprordia

+ WRBIANOPENCR

aane

Lapin cen?

SOW RNGUSIDL PIB B2R DOW

PINCH = B25 mies
FROM MBLS? > BBE KHAMRIRES

%. Pagan
2. Reroreson
SJ. Hawaiisn
A. Seardrasiarn Polyaasoxt
4, Canhas Balyowetarr
6. New Credponur
Y. Koxt Retanesiag
NM
Sy
Sn 5
pane
2: so>
< Pass
3
Res
SR >
6 i
Se i

SPYRO SSW

71

Raymond Dasmann

Three biogeographic provinces in California: redwood, chaparral, and desert.
From: Environmental Conservation.
“A sense of identity or place develops where an individual grows up within a particular province and
learns to recognize its flora and fauna, to respond to its climatic regime, to become familiar with its lim-
its. Many serious land use blunders could have been avoided if people had not tried to transplant land-use
practices developed within one biotic province to the differing ecological conditions of another.”

inces: Oregonian, Sierra-Cascade, Great Basin,
Sonoran, and Californian (a sixth that I had
added, the Channel Islands, has been dropped
by Udvardy).®

The Oregonian province belongs to the
Northwest and extends up to Canada. It is a
region of tall, massive coastal forests, rain-
drenched in winter, often fog-bound in sum-
mer. A greater mass of vegetation per square
mile grows here than in any other area of the
world. California has its own unique subdivi-
sion of this province, in the redwood region of
which it shares only a small corner with
Oregon.

The second extends along the high moun-
tains of the Pacific Coast from the Fraser River
in British Columbia south through the vol-
canic Cascades and then down the Sierra Ne-
vada to the Tehachapi Mountains. Although
the Sierra and Cascade sections differ strongly
geologically, their vegetation and animal life
do not separate out sufficiently to warrant dif-

72

ferent provincial status. Their vegetation is ar-
ranged in the life zones characteristic of west-
ern mountains, with a broad band of ponderosa
pine near the lower edges of the province and a
fringe of timberline forest at the upper limits
of tree growth.

The third province belongs to the inter-
mountain region, from the Sierras to the Rock-
ies—the Basin and Range province of physiog-
raphers. California includes only a small area,
in the Lassen-Modoc region of the northeast,
and the Inyo-Mono section east of the highest
Sierra. This is a country characterized by sage-
brush, juniper, and pinyon pine.

The fourth province is desert and has its af-
finities with Arizona, New Mexico, and Son-
ora. California's Mojave and Colorado deserts
have many differences from their counterparts
across the Colorado River, but not enough to
be called separate provinces.

All of the rest of the state is in the Califor-
nian province, which has a fauna and flora

Biogeographical Provinces

characteristic of California and, in most re-
spects, of nowhere else. This is the region of
chaparral, broadleaved evergreen forest and
woodland, of open oak savannas, and prairies
that are summer dry, and winter green.

I have analyzed the differences in mammal-
ian species distribution between the provinces,
admittedly using fairly crude methods. The
greatest similarity is between the Oregonian
and Sierra-Cascade provinces, which had ap-
proximately 68% of their mammal species or
subspecies in common. This was not enough
difference to warrant provincial separation on
the basis of mammals alone. Much greater dif-
ferences show up, however, in bird faunas and
in vegetation. By contrast the Great Basin
province shares only around 36% of its mam-
mal species or subspecies with the Sonoran,
and 38% with the Californian province. The
Californian province has less than 50% of its
mammal species or subspecies shared with any
other province.

If we can agree at this point that biotic
provinces are indeed different, then we can
agree that to protect a particular array of plants
or animals we should establish at least one re-
serve or other protected area in each province.
Looking around the world, however, we find
that whereas there are many national parks in
some provinces, those of the African savanna,
for example, there are none or scarcely any in
others—the desert and semi-arid provinces of
the Old World, or in various tropical rain for-
est provinces. If there is to be a choice it makes
more sense to establish a national park in the
Sahara, in a place where desert wildlife sur-
vives, than to establish another park in the
East African savanna.

However, the usefulness of the province con-
cept can be extended beyond the practice of
plant and animal species conservation. They
represent areas within which ecological condi-
tions are relatively uniform, with certain natu-
ral potentials and limitations. During human
history societies and cultures developed within
certain provinces and adapted to their poten-
tials and limitations. A sense of identity or

place develops where an individual grows up
within a particular province and learns to rec-
ognize its flora and fauna, to respond to its cli-
matic regime, to become familiar with its lim-
its. Many serious land-use blunders could have
been avoided if people had not tried to trans-
plant land-use practices developed within one
biotic province to the differing ecological con-
ditions of another.

In the United States we are cursed with state
and county boundaries drawn with straight-
edges by people who did not know the land.
Would it not make more sense to re-orient
them toward ecological realities? Worldwide,
the existing national boundaries are for the
most part absurd, particularly in those Third
World regions where former colonial powers
decided where the lines should be drawn. If
people were allowed to sort themselves out ra-
tionally some new array of ethno-biotic entities
would take the place of the existing nation-
states.

I don’t think we have gone far enough yet in
our thinking about biogeographic provinces to
start reorganizing the political world. People
have been living on the planet for too long for
their influence to be ignored. The distribution
of human groups which have developed a sense
of self-identity is at least as important as the
distribution of plant species. One cannot put
the English and Irish in the same country just
because they share a biotic province. However,
if we are to find a way out of the mess in which
global industrial culture has placed us, the
biogeographic map could be pointing in a use-
ful direction.

REFERENCES

1. Clements, F. and V. Shelford. 1939. Bzo-ecology. John
Wiley, New York.

2. Udvardy, M.D. F., 1975. A classification of the biogeo-
graphical provinces of the world. Y'UCN Occasional Paper
No. 18, IUCN, Morges, Switzerland.

3. Dice, L.R., 1943. The biotic provinces of North Amer-
ita. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

4. Dasmann, R. F., 1973. A system for defining and classi-
fying natural regions for purposes of conservation. Y\UCN Oc-
casional Paper No. 7, IUCN, Morges, Switzerland.

#2

eDeSNitt

The Lefthanded
Bear and Other
Animal Stories

From Stewart Brand’s introduction
of J. D. at the Whole Earth Jambo-
ree, Summer 1978: “J. D. Smith has
been with us since so many begin-
nings it’s hard to count them. Back
in earliest Whole Earth Truck Store
days when the store needed a man-
ager, J. D. showed up. He’s one of
the few cowboys trained in phenome-
nological philosophy at Harvard.
He’s a pretty good philosopher and a
damned good cowboy, and one of the
great story tellers. It was J]. D. who
introduced the whole genre of ani-
mal stories to COEVOLUTION
QUARTERLY.”

CQ printed its first animal stories
in 1976; the genre lasted five years,
fueled some by reader letters, and
some by new stories J. D. heard dur-
ing his summers in Idaho. These se-
lections are culled from the full half-
decade’s-worth.

Art Kleiner

74

BIG AL’S BEAR STORY

(heard in the Lardo Saloon, McCall, Idaho, late
summer 1974)

“Me and Churd and Hern were fishing the
Wind River up from the McMeeken place and
I was carrying a mess of fish back to this big
rock where we had the fire, and when I came
around the rock I ran into a lefthanded bear
standing on his back legs. He looked me in the
eye, kinda woofed, took a step my way, and I
threw the fish at him. He didn’t take the bait,
so I screamed and started running across to the
only tree around that wasn’t a peckerpole. I
made a jump I didn’t believe but just as I was
pulling my ass up to the limb, he took a swipe
at my ass with his left paw, and took a big
chunk out of my right cheek. Buy me a beer
and Il] show you the scars.”

HOW TO GET AWAY FROM A BEAR

(heard in Burgdorf, Idaho, summer 1973)

“Me and my nephew are up here from Tucson
looking for gold. We were walking into Cali-
fornia Lake, cause the road is still drifted shut
in places, carrying our pans and lunch, and I
noticed that there were pretty fresh bear tracks
going our way across the drifts. So we slowed
down a little. After a while we took the cutoff
down to the lake, which isn’t nothing but a
peat bog, and when we finished lunch and were
walking back out, there were fresh tracks
ahead of us again. My nephew said that he’d
always heard that you could get away from a
bear by running downhill, cause somehow a
bear is built to go uphill but not down. Could
be something to it. I remember this oldtimer
telling me that if a miner met a bear in the
snow he ought to stand in his pan and start
sliding downhill, and the bear won't follow.”

The Lefthanded Bear and Other Animal Stories

LITTLE KNOWN SUPPOSITION
Seagulls drink sea water.

ANOTHER ONE
Pigeons take care of their elders.

MOUSE STASH ONE

I was a janitorial understudy in a big church
office building, when one of the old-hand sec-
retaries from the fourth floor showed up on the
first floor with nervous perspiration and tales of
mice in her desk. By the time I got back to her
office with her, rodentophobia had filled the
rooms of her fellow workers. Her desk had nice
piles of paper on top, but underneath, where
the typewriter supposedly goes when it swings
away, was a little television set with an ear-
phone, a few crumby tinfoil lunch wrappers,
and an eight-day-old nibbling mouse. She had
been watching soap operas when the mouse ap-
peared, right there beside the drama.

Enter Caesar, the real janitor, carrying a me-
chanic’s red rag as a mousetrap. The mouse ran
up into the innards of the desk, and Caesar
started tapping different places on the metal
sides with the butt of his screwdriver, but the
mouse had somewhere to hide and noise didn’t
bother it. It wouldn’t come out to be slaugh-
tered, so at Caesar’s noisiest moment, I took
the rag, wadded it up in my palms, caught
Caesar’s eye, and started walking slowly
through the four grandmother secretaries.

It worked, the mock murder did. They
thanked us plenty, and we cracked-up in the
elevator. About two hours later, I was called
back to the fourth floor when one of the ladies
nailed the second mouse with the lip of an up-
side-down metal wastebasket. I carried it away
in paper towels and tossed it in the dumpster.

MOUSE STASH TWO

I developed a pack rat roommate while I was
sleeping light and alone in a mountain cabin
in the dark of winter. He was nocturnal, and
would pat his tail when happy or eating. It
sounded like a little girl knocking at the door,
and would wake me up, and I'd yell at the lit-
tle fucker to quit reminding me of my daugh-

ter. He’d quit patting his tail and I’d go back
to sleep. He’d crawl in at dawn and I'd do the
day shift in the snow in the hot springs.

Eventually, he stole my braided silver neck
chain, which I had carried all the way from
Cambridge, but which I took off when I was
trying to sleep. I began the search for his nest
in my home, but I had so much clutter to my
personal relation with the material objects
around me that he could have been almost
anywhere.

I waited up with a gun and a flashlight, saw
where he ran when I hassled him, and blew
him away with a twenty-two in the back of the
head, about a foot behind where I lay my head
when I slept. For murder I got a bunch of but-
tons, tinfoil corners, a roach clip, and my
braided silver neck chain, which, at this
writing, is lost again.

MOUSE DISCOUNT
(heard in Burgdorf, Idaho, 1974)

“I was the manager of the Penney’s store in
Nampa for a few years. One year business got a
little slow, so I took a piece of plywood, drilled
about fifty inch-and-a-half holes in it, ran-
domly numbered them either ten, twenty,
thirty, or forty percent, nailed mason jar rings
to the bottoms, and screwed pint jars into
them. The idea was that when a person had
something figured out that he wanted to buy,
he’d bring it to the mouse board, and I'd let
out this little mouse and whatever hole the
mouse would run down, that is how much dis-
count the person would get. Now the trick is
this: a mouse won't go into a hole where no
mouse has ever been, so by taking a few mouse
turds and dropping them down the ten percent
holes, and say one turd down one of the forty
percent holes, I could provide a little excite-
ment for the customers, and a little for myself,
as long as I only marked up the goods fifteen or
twenty percent.”

COONDOG MEMORY

(heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen

years ago)

“Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only
follow a trail twice as old as the average dog
can, but she’s got a pretty good memory to

75

J. D. Smith

boot. For instance, last week this old boy who
lives down the road from me, and is forever
stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some

city fellow around to try out ol’ Sis here. So I
turned her out south of the house and she made
two or three big swings back and forth across
the edge of the woods, set back her head,
bayed a couple of times, cut straight through
the woods, come to a little clearing, jumped
about three foot straight up in the air, run to
the other side, and commenced to letting out a
racket like she had something treed. We went
over there with our flashlights and shone them
up in the tree but couldn’t catch no shine off a
coon’s eyes, and my neighbor sorta indicated
that ol’ Sis might be a little crazy, ‘cause she
stood right to the tree and kept singing up into
it. So I pulled off my coat and climbed up into
the branches, and sure enough, there was a
coon skeleton wedged in between a couple of
branches about twenty foot up. Now as I was
saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but
this fellow was still calling her crazy or
touched ‘cause she had hopped up in the air
while she was crossing the clearing, until I re-
minded him that the Hawkins’ had a fence
across there about five years back. Now, this
dog is for sale.”

HOW TO FIX A DOG RACE

My Grandpa Frary took a dogfever pilgrimage
from Colorado to Florida to learn how grey-
hounds are trained to run. He found out that
many trainers work the dogs in low pens with
live rabbits. Real rabbits rarely run in perfect
half-mile ovals like their mechanical cousins at
the track do. Real rabbits dart and weave and
slow down just a little before they change di-
rections. The dogs sense the move coming and
break their own strides to make the turn with
the real rabbits. At the track the mechanical
rabbit runs on a rheostat setup, so that the per-
son who is controlling the speed of the track
bunny can slow it down at just the right time,
the lead dogs think the rabbit is going to take
a ninety degree turn, break their stride a little,
and the hind dogs catch up. This knowledge
didn’t keep my Grandpa from betting on the
dogs.

76

CHARLIE THE GOOSE

(heard in Burgdorf, Idaho, July 1976)

“A year ago last Spring, my oldest daughter’s
boyfriend gave her a little bitty wild Canadian
honker, and she raised it up on mush and milk
out on the back porch with our three dogs.
That goose got housebroke pretty soon, and
would come up to the back door just like the
dogs, and he’d peck on it, and we'd let him in,
and he’d beg food from the table, and it even
got to the point where when my daughter was
loading the dogs in the back of the pickup
she’d just call “Charlie, Charlie,” and that
blamed goose would fly right up in the back
of the truck and ride there, like a dog.

“Well, we worried ol’ Charlie through hunt-
ing season that Fall, and kept him warm by the
fire all Winter, then this Spring he started
being gone overnight and the first time we fig-
ured out what he was up to was when one of
our neighbors called up and said that our goose
was down there bothering his dogs, and keep-
ing folks awake all night. We figured he was
trying to mate with a dog since he probably
had never seen another goose.

“Finally he was gone for a couple of weeks
and we started believing he’d flown up to Can-
ada or somewhere, when my daughter was
driving about fifteen miles from our place, and
saw a wild goose out in back of this old fellow’s
place, and stopped and it turned out to be
Charlie with his wings clipped. She and the
old man had quite an argument about whose
goose it was, but she eventually proved to him
that the goose would follow her anywhere she
would go, so she helped him up in the back of
the truck and brought him home and put him
out on the porch with the dogs, and, you
know, believe it or not, we got up the next
morning and our own dogs had eaten that
goose. Musta had something to do with his
wings being clipped.”

LAST DEPRESSION CHICKEN FISHING

My dad is a railroader. He tells the story of
being a young and hungry railroader during
the thirties who rented a room over a chicken-
yard, and worked the night shift. He’d set out

trot lines from his window, bait them with
canned corn, and let the chicken hook itself.

_ He claims you had to be pretty fast to get one

up to the second floor before it made much
noise.

_ DOG FISHING

Dave Dewey invented a good city sport, in-
volving a surf rod, spinning reel, lots of good
line, and a bone. Most dogs like some form of
tug-of-war, so you find an alley and cast out
into it, wait for a dog to come along, and try to
reel him in before he breaks the line or lets go
of the bone. Or you can try trolling from the
back of a pickup truck.

THE BEAR AND THE POINTED STICK
(Told to me by Gene Fuzzell, retired Sheriff of
Idaho County, Idaho.)

“Word came down off of Marshall Mountain
that Old Peterson had run into some trouble,
so I rode up there one day, and as I came up
over the top of the ridge and down onto what
used to be Peterson’s cabin, right there to the
east of the house I found a bear trap cabled to
four trees with a yearling bear in it, dead and
bloated about a week, and a few chunks of dog
meat scattered around like Peterson and his
dogs had run into trouble alright. There was
plenty of big bear signs and the old man’s
bootmarks.

“T guess the only gun Peterson owned was an
air pistol for the pack rats, because next to the
trapped bear I found a little lodgepole about

| twelve foot long with a sharpened spike on the
_ end of it, held down by two hose clamps. Got

to looking around and started finding pellets
from his pistol too, so I started tracking him
and the big bear. Didn’t take long, cause the

_ pellets were in a box in his shirtpocket. As he

started running along the hillside, he started

_ spilling pellets.

“His head was laying a couple of feet from

_ his body, and his left arm was tucked right
_ into his chest, like a lefthanded pledge of alle-

giance. The folks at the hospital didn’t like it
much when I had him x-rayed for lead.

“What I figure happened was that either Pe-
terson was awful hungry for bear meat or the

The Lefthanded Bear and Other Animal Stories

big bear had been bothering him so much that
he figured to trap it and just let it starve to
death, but he caught a little one by mistake,
and it was crying so much that Peterson was
worried his claim would fill up with bears. A
bear will go to trouble just like a dog will go to
a dogfight. So Peterson figured to kill the little
bear with a pointed stick, and about the time
he got the job half done, the other bear showed
up and was mad enough to rip him from ass-
hole to elbow. There’s talk that there’s ore on
that side of the mountain that runs forty
ounces to a ton gold, and thirty silver.”

A TRAPPER’S DOG

(From Leroy Rainey, Roseberry, Idaho,

January 1979)

“We had a bad time when we first came to this
country. We were living out where the roosters
fuck the hoot owls and I was out of a job. So
the Missus decides to take in ironing to get
some money. You know, heating up the iron on
the woodstove and sprinkling from a pork and
beans can. And me, I decided to take up
trapping.

“We had this old dog named Dave, looked
like a coonhound with long hair that run into
an airplane propeller. He was hungry as the
rest of us and about half smart.

“T didn’t have any traps, so being the opti-
mist I was, I spent one night whittling a cou-
ple of stretcher boards to fit rabbit hides, start-
ing small. When I got finished I set them
outside the door and next morning when I got
up, there was two dead rabbits laying there by
my stretcher boards. I looked at old Dave and
he kinda winked at me, so I went ahead that
night and whittled up some bigger boards, and
sure enough next morning there was a marten
and a bobcat laying dead next to them, and
Dave looking a little tired but happy.

“Well, things went on like that for quite a
while. My fortunes was on the rise and me and
Dave was eating good, until one night I came
home half full of Jack Daniels and told my
wife that we was getting too damn fancy to
have her be taking in ironing anymore. Now |
don’t know what I was thinking about, and
without the booze I probably wouldn’t have

ii

J. D. Smith

done it, but I went and set that ironing board
outside the door and I never saw old Dave
again.”

A BOOT STORY
(heard in the McCall, Idaho, hospital,

Summer 1977)

“Back in the ’30s, I buckarooed for the ought-
eight, down in the Snake River country one
winter, where the lizards were glad to see you,
the sun shined about two hours a day once a
month, and cattle were half shadows from hav-
ing to climb cliffs to get to the bunch grass. As
I remember, the pay was thirty dollars a month
and all the cowshit you could eat, so it took the
better part of a lifetime to save up for a new
pair of boots, but somehow that winter I had
made it all the way into Grangeville and
bought a spanking new pair of black beauties
with little red roses stitched into the tops.
“Now me and ol’ Dogmeat, my cow pony,
were ambling along one afternoon, trailing
some heifers back down into the bottomlands,

78

and | had a cigarette in my mouth and one leg
cocked up over the saddle horn polishing my
left boot with my snot rag when Dogmeat
spooked at a prairie dog or something, and I
come unseated with one leg hung up ina stir-
rup. Of course, the heifers spooked at me
dragging along on the ground and they began
to make tracks for the river and ol’ Dogmeat,
being the pony he was, just wasn’t going to let
the cattle get away, whether I went along or
not, and he began to pour on the coal to catch
the heifers, which left me bouncing along from
boulder to boulder, until, almost halfway to
the river, Dogmeat kicked me in the chest hard
enough to pull my foot out of the boot that
was hung up.

“Now I laid there feeling mighty sorry for
myself for a long time, until I got to feeling
like I should at least find Dogmeat, so I crip-
pled the rest of the way down the hill and
found him holding the heifers on a little sand-
bar, and you know, by God, right there in my
stirrup was that right boot. Boy, was I lucky.”

|

Animal Story
Letters

CUTE RACCOON STORY

Traveling cross-country on a ten-speed bike
tour, we stopped to spend a few days at St. An-
drews State Park in Panama City Beach, Flor-
ida. There we soon found that we had some
competition for our campsite—after sundown
the skunks and raccoons moved in. It was not
uncommon to wake up in the morn’ to find a
dozen or so unwanted visitors helping them-
selves to whatever leftovers we had forgotten
to hide away the night before.

On one of these occasions I awoke to find a
half dozen raccoons working their way through
a bag of Oreo cookies I had splurged on right
before bedtime. Usually I enjoyed these late
night raids. But tonight I was mad—that was
my breakfast they were eating!—and I went
after them with whatever I could find to throw.
The ’coons took off fast. I secured the few re-
maining undamaged Oreos and went back to
bed.

I was sleeping under the stars that night,
stretched out beneath a friendly old Florida
pine. After five minutes back in the sack,
hanging right on the edge of sleep, I looked
up—and saw a monstrously large limb about
twenty feet above my head that was in the pro-
cess of breaking off.

I did an incredible high-speed roll to my

left, sleeping bag and all. I got maybe five feet
out of the way before the branch crashed to the
ground.

It was six feet long and a good four inches
thick—and had fallen approximately twenty
feet to touch down with deadly accuracy on the
towel I had been using for a pillow.

Accident? Coincidence? Bad luck? Not a
chance. I heard rustling noises from the for-
mer position of the fallen limb—two raccoons.
They were rapidly leaving the scene of their
attempted homicide, but one of them paused
long enough to turn around and look back. He
stared straight at me with a gleam in his bright
yellow eyes.

I spent the rest of the night out in the open,
and I no longer mess with raccoons.

Michael McClelland
Anderson, South Carolina
{Fall 1977]

AN AWFUL ROACH STORY

Your cockroach letters reminded me of my en-
counter with roaches. In 1939 my mother and
I sailed on a small coast steamer from Chefoo to
Shanghai, on the way home from a summer va-
cation. The first night out I ate supper at the
children’s sitting, put on my pajamas and went
to bed. My mother left to have her meal with
the adults. After reading for a while I turned
off the light and settled down to sleep. It was
hot, so I left the covers off. After the light had
been off for about a minute I gradually became
aware of a soft tickly feeling through my hair,
over my pajamas, and concentrating especially
on my toenails and fingernails. I switched on
the light, and surprised about 100 cockroaches
which were nibbling on my hair and nails and
climbing over my body. Well, maybe not 100
but lots, anyway. I vaulted energetically from

79

Animal Story Letters

the top bunk to the floor and spent the next
three minutes shaking every part of my body,
clothes and hair and yelling “Eesh! Eesh!” (the
current version of “‘yuck.”) The roaches disap-
peared; I was too upset to notice where they'd
gone. I climbed back into the bunk and turned
off the light again. This time they didn’t wait
at all. The light went off, the cockroaches
started nibbling, and I went into my jumping
and yelling number again. I was an experi-
enced enough traveler to know how to get the
cabin steward in an emergency, but I was so
tired and upset that all I could think of was
finding my mother. I ran into the dining room
barefoot and called out loudly “Mummy! The
cockroaches are eating me!’ My mother, em-
barrassed, hustled me out of the dining room.
Together we found the cabin steward who filled
our cabin with the fumes of Flit, pumped out
of a little glass Flit-gun. The cockroaches left,
probably to try their luck next door, and I was
able to get some sleep.
For years I’ve told this story to people. I
ran into some skepticism about whether the
roaches were actually eating my hair and nails
or were just checking me out. After a while I
began to doubt my own memory; however, I
recently read (in a children’s science book
about roaches) that they are particularly partial
to eating hair and nail parings.
Dorothy Horn
San Jose, California
[Fall 1977]

STRANGER THAN FICTION
TRUE ROACH STORY

Several years ago, while living in Fort Lauder-
dale, my wife and I had problems with the
one-and-a-half-inch Florida variety of cock-
roach. Whenever one of us came in the door,
their small brown bodies could be seen scurry-
ing behind furniture and around corners.

The most common course of action was to
arm myself with a can of bug spray and go
small-game hunting. One night I was using
guerrilla tactics in a battle with a particularly
ferocious spider. This involved leaping close to
the wall he had stationed himself on, spraying

80

him with the bug spray, and getting back out
of the way before he could attack. The only ef-
fect of all this was to cover him with so much
of the white spray that he looked like a hateful
plaster museum model of a four-inch arachnid.

After about the fifteenth attack, while our
eyes were locked in mutual species hatred, I
began to have the distinct impression of being
watched from the closet about four feet away.
The feeling was not one of malevolence, but
of a sort of benign curiosity. I immediately
turned to address the intruder into my private
wars and came face to face with a very large
male cockroach (substitute female if you feel
that theirs is a matriarchal society). He was
immobile except for a systematic, constant
back-and-forth waggling of his antennae, and
he was very definitely wondering what the hell
I was doing.

Suddenly I began to feel very foolish, stand-
ing there on my bug-spray battlefield. I real-
ized that these bugs didn’t hate me, they were
simply trying to make a living. So why was I
trying so hard to eradicate them? I began to
feel a need to explain my actions, and since I
could feel a very distinct mental connection be-
tween myself and the cockroach, I began to try
and explain things to him. This was somewhat
difficult at first since I don’t normally commu-
nicate telepathically with bugs. I told him
that it wasn’t so much that I, or other people,
wished to kill him and his friends—it was just
that they couldn’t be running around the house
all the time when we were there. It bothers
people, for Chrissakes, to open the door and
see cockroaches running all over the place. Not
that there was anything inherently wrong with
them, of course. (I was trying hard not to of-
fend him.)

Sensing that my thoughts weren’t carrying
a whole lot of weight, I decided to offer a com-
promise. “Why don’t we do it this way—
whenever there are people around, which
would be during the day and evening, you
cockroaches stay out of sight. Then at night,
when everybody’s asleep, your group can have
the whole house. Just stay off the beds and
make sure everyone is asleep before you come

Animal Story Letters

out. I really don’t enjoy killing you, but I have
to. I’m under tremendous social and racial
pressure to keep you from overrunning my
house. So if you only come out at night there
won't be any problem. I won’t set out any poi-
son or fumigators and you won't interfere with
my life, agreed?”

I received no message in response. He sim-
ply turned around and walked away. Appar-
ently the conversation was finished. But from
that day on we never saw another cockroach in
the house. They cleaned up all the crumbs and
dirt but they always waited till late at night.

I told a few of my friends about this (very
few) and was asked to come over and have a
talk with their roaches. I found that the large
ones were always pretty agreeable and I gener-
ally established contact with them. Once or
twice they agreed to the terms and tried to live
in harmony with mankind. The smaller type of
cockroach was much less communicative. They
ignored most of my attempts at mental contact
and never made any effort to go along with the
terms of the treaty. I now feel that they simply
don’t have the facilities for this type of contact;
they are on a different wavelength, or they just
didn’t agree to the terms.

The spider was a different story altogether.
As soon as I finished my conversation with the
cockroach, the spider attacked, obviously
thinking he could surprise me while I was still
dazed. Fortunately my survival instincts were
intact and unfettered. Catching his leap out of
the corner of my eye, I jumped back two steps,
and, feinting with the can of bug spray in my
left hand, stepped on him as soon as he hit the
floor.

Stephen Finn
{Spring 1978]

DOG'S LIFE

Taurus Tom is a skinny blond barefoot hippie

I knew in San Francisco in the late 1960s. He
had a large black dog heavy in the neck and
shoulders with pointed ears that curved up-
wards like horns, called Taurus. Taurus walked
with a limp. When I asked Tom why, he re-
plied, “He was run over by the Krishna Jug-

gernaut while I was watching their annual pa-
rade. He would have been killed,’’ he added as
an afterthought, “but the head swami made
them stop and pull Taurus from beneath the
wheels. The swami claimed he knew Taurus
and that he had been a great swami ina past
life?

I left town shortly thereafter and did not re-
turn for several years. Upon my return I in-
quired into the present whereabouts of past
associates. I was told, ““Taurus Tom went to
Hawaii to join a Christian commune there. He
is not called Taurus Tom anymore. Taurus died
last year, just before Tom left. He was run over
by the Juggernaut at the annual Krishna
parade.”

I thought it curious that a large healthy
street-wise dog like Taurus, who had great
presence, should be run over twice by a float
in a parade. I had only a vague idea of what a
Juggernaut is so I looked it up in the
dictionary.

“Tdol of the Hindu God Krishna pulled
around ina large cart. Devotees of the God
are said to have thrown themselves under the
wheels to be crushed to death.”

—Thorndike Barnhart Comprehensive

Desk Dictionary
(Published by Doubleday, 1952)

Joe Corgo
Domesa, New Mexico
{Spring 1981}

OR AM I A BUTTERFLY DREAMING
I AM A MAN?

You dream. And I dream. And we both know
that if we let sleeping dogs lie, they will
twitch, whimper—and dream. What about
all the other critters: horses, marmots, toads,
terns, and termites? Where in phylogeny does
dreaming begin—at the same place as sleep
(wherever that is) or somewhere else?

That question of course raises a parallel one
for ontogeny. Talk about a dream within a
dream: how much of a brain does a fetus need
for a fetus-dream? Or is all uterine life a dream
and ex-utero dreaming a harkening to it,
which we've long since put to other uses?

81

Animal Story Letters

The best answer I’ve heard so far, to the
phylogenetic question at least, is that no one
knows because dreaming is hard to define in
experimental terms. All right, then: REM
sleep, has no one tested for it among the
“lower” orders?

Nobody I know seems to know. So I ask you
and your readers: does a wild bear dream in the
woods?

William deBuys
Austin, Texas
{Summer 1982]

NOT A BUTTERFLY; A WHALE, MAYBE

This is in response to William deBuys’ letter
concerning rapid eye movement (REM) sleep
in animals (“Or Am I a Butterfly Dreaming I
Am a Man?” Summer 82 CQ). It is taken from
Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep by Wil-
liam C. Dement (W. H. Freeman and Com-
pany, San Francisco, 1978):

“Most reptiles appear to have non-REM
sleep as we know it, but do not show any REM
sleep at all. Birds have a very well-developed
non-REM sleep and show very brief (about one
second) episodes of what appears to be an evo-
lutionary precursor of the REM period. Full-
blown REM periods exist only in mammalian
sleep. Interestingly enough, all mammals ap-
pear to have substantial amounts of REM
sleep, and whatever differences exist do not fol-
low any apparent rule. . . . A few of the many
species whose sleep has been carefully studied
are elephant, chimpanzee, whale, shrew, pig,
sheep, monkey, rat, mouse, cat, bat, dog,
donkey, guinea pig, and human. Some non-
mammals that have been observed by sleep re-
searchers are frog, alligator, lizard, various
fish, pigeon, chicken, eagle, and snake. . . .

“One of the most remarkable aspects of
REM sleep is the very large amount that is
present in most mammals immediately after
birth. In the newborn human baby, who sleeps

82

an average of sixteen to eighteen hours per day,
fully fifty percent of all sleep (eight to nine
hours!) is occupied by REM periods. . . .

“In premature infants of thirty-two to
thirty-six weeks gestation, the percent of REM
sleep is even higher, around seventy-five per-
cent. . . . This finding suggests that there is a
phase in the early intrauterine life of the child
when REM sleep is the all-encompassing mode
of existence aaa

“In some animals the predominance of REM
sleep in early life is even more spectacular. For
example, in the newborn kitten, REM sleep is
the only sleep. This is also true of the newborn
puppy, rat, and hamster. On the other hand,
the newborn guinea pig has very little REM
sleep.

“Because of the extraordinary amount of
REM sleep in infants, and our difficulty in
demonstrating the purpose of REM sleep in
adults, we cannot help wondering if the real
function of REM sleep is fulfilled early in life.
Perhaps REM sleep is necessary for the normal
pre- and postnatal maturation of the brain.
This fits with the guinea pig data because that
animal is mature at birth. jamen uncer

Sussex, New Jersey
{Winter 1982]

STANLEY MARSH 3 RIDES AGAIN

I am afraid of my cows. I know that one of
them hates me, maybe they all hate me and al-
ways have. But there is at least one out there
who knows that I can be had. I can be knocked
down and rolled around and sent crawling off
in pain. Has she told the others? I can’t tell.
But each time I force myself to go among
them, each twitch of the ear and stomp of the
hoof seems to be telling me that the word is

out. I can be had. Stanley Marsh 3

Amarillo, Texas
{Summer 1984]

STEWART BRAND

-How to Run
the Arms Race
Backwards

This article, published in Spring
1977, is typical of Stewart’s writing.
It’s direct, pungent, and informal;
it’s liberally sprinkled with fascinat-
ing gossip from a wide variety of
fields; it’s full of original thoughts,
strongly stated (“Ignorance is a sin in
a different way than it used to be’),
and it’s directed towards an impor-
tant purpose.

There’s no need to introduce that
purpose: it'll be clear from the first
paragraph, if not the title, of the ar-
ticle. Unfortunately, with the spe-

_cialized exception of Amnesty Inter-
national, there still is no global

effort (that we know of ) towards the
kind of Alcoholics Anonymous

equivalent for nuclear war that Stew-

art proposed here. One final com-

_ ment: if Stewart’s writing before
1982 reads like it’s written in one

draft, that’s because it usually was.
What happened in 1982? He gota
word processor.

Art Kleiner

A dog that hasn't been chained up long forgets. It rushes
across the yard and then—bang. Today when people be-
come excited about the future and involve themselves with
new uses of technology they often get carried away with
hope—then bam—they think about the atomic bomb, the
H bomb, the ballistic missile. Today, like the dog, we all
have the chain on us. There is nothing very marvelous
going on unless it 1s something to untie that chain.

Steve Baer

YOU CAN MAKE MONEY DEMONSTRATING
ARMS RACES

Tell some people (friends, students, audience,
whatever) that you re going to auction off a
five-dollar bill. Highest bidder gets it.

“Oboy,” says the suckers.

“One stipulation,” you add. “I get the
money from both the highest and the second-
highest bidders.” “Hm, OK,” says the
suckers.

The bidding begins. “ro cents!” “20 cents!”
“30 cents!” It continues. “$1.50!” “$1.75!”
People may or may not notice when it goes
past “$2.50!,” at which point you're making
money.

They w2// notice when the bidding goes past
$5. It will inevitably do that because whoever’s
just had his bid of $4.50 beat by someone bid-
ding $4.75 stands to lose his $4.50 and get
nothing. If he bids $5.10 for the $5 bill and
wins, then he only loses 10 cents.

Unfortunately the now second-highest bid-
der stands to lose all of his $4.75 bid and get
nothing, and he raises the bid. So it goes, in-
definitely. You can sell your $5 bill for a /ot of
money. I’ve done it. Its market price is essen-
tially infinite.

You've set in motion an Arms Race, a cyber-

83

Stewart Brand

netic runaway of positive feedback—the more,
the more. (Negative feedback would be, the
more, the less.) Once past $5 the bids become
increasingly radical—‘‘$7!” “$10!” “$20!” —
as each party tries to annihilate the hopes of
the other.

Everybody loses (except you, the arms man-
ufacturer). What keeps the bidding going is
each bidder’s fear of losing more than the other
fool—to quit, pay over the losing bid of $40
or whatever, and get nothing! Pity, maybe.

Watch the loser. He may in vengefulness
try to start a different contest with the win-
ner which he might win. He may look for an-
other set of people to pull the same trick on
himself. Or he may puzzle at the phenom-
enon and look for its solution. Even winners
might do that, in view of the cost of
winning. ...

CONTEXT

Within the structure of an Arms Race there is
no formal solution. They run to exhaustion.
The place to look for relief is the context in
which they are embedded—the language of
the rules of the game and the cultural valuing
of its conduct.

The present international rules—the real
ones—are still pretty much what was estab-
lished at Versailles in 1919 when the Allies
went back on their promises to the defeated
Germans. The rules are: anything goes. That
principle lived on in President Johnson’s Viet-
nam policy, “When you got ’em by the balls,
their hearts and minds will follow.” Interest-
ingly, it was not the slogan of the winning
side, but considerable expenditure of life and
treasure was made in its service.

Is faith in the devil rewarded? Yes, but never
for long.

My generation—I’m thirty-eight—grew
up expecting nuclear devastation. The earliest
dream I remember is of Rockford, Illinois, my
home, obliterated by Russian atomic bombs.
(The town fathers were ambivalently proud
that Rockford was supposedly seventh on the
Russian list because of our machine tool indus-
try.) In my dream I always survived to search

84

through the exciting panic and rubble for the
lost fragments of myself—friends, family, fa-
miliar places.

The thrill of World War II was not repeated
in our lifetime though it was faithfully
awaited. Hiroshima spawned a generation of
apocalypse buffs whose fantasies by the ’70s
have convoluted into full absurdity. We have
wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or dramatic
social change to come and bomb us into the
Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in
our valley with our localism, our appropriate
technology, our gardens, and our homemade
religion, guilt-free at last.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, ex-
cept the notion that a disaster or revolution
will make it possible. Comes any crunch at
all—-war, famine, serious depression—the first
to go will be all our environmental accom-
plishments and any equity, any democracy, any
localism, any grace. We can be pro-environ-
ment or pro-apocalypse, but not both without
being grotesque. Some of us have done that—I
for one—and some knew better. In any case
the attitude seems to be passing.

What’s the point then? The point is that the
Arms Race is not taken seriously enough by
our social innovators to try to do anything very
radical about it. When it is not unconsciously
worshipped it is perceived as too abstract, too
remote, old hat. It is all those, but consider
the effort that goes into stopping nuclear reac-
tors in the United States and compare the like-
lihood and magnitude of radiation hazard from
the use of nuclear reactors versus the use of nu-
clear weapons.

I figure that people are fighting nuclear en-
ergy as the only accessible toenail of the nu-
clear arms dragon. The reactors stand for the
weapons because we feel helpless to do any-
thing about the weapons.

Worldwide, there are just a few hundred people,
outside foreign offices, working full time on dis-
armament issues. Regrettably, far more atten-
tion is paid to other major world problems—
such as energy, the environment, development,
population, and so on. A relatively large fraction
of the few hundred disarmament scholars is So-

How to Run the Arms Race Backwards

viet. In the non-Communist developed countries
disarmament is not a popular subject for study.

Frank Barnaby
New Scientist

Ido not think that environmentalism can get

| very far while this situation prevails. People do

not sufficiently believe there is a future to con-

serve for. The main article of their disbelief,
reasonably, is the persistent growth of nuclear
mega-tonnage whose only function is to de-

_stroy whole systems.

Try a fantasy experiment. Imagine our pres-
ent life and behavior with only one change—
the confident absence of expectations of apoca-
lypse. Imagine having creatively in mind the
conduct of your family, neighborhood, busi-
“ness, town, county, state, nation, world over
centuries of adaptation that you can work on
“now.

If that vision surprises you or leads you to
thoughts you haven’t had, you’ve got a picture
_of the present opportunist (get it while you
| can) context of arms uncontrol. Not
“promising.

WEAPONS ADDICTION

Gregory Bateson has drawn the formal parallel
between an Arms Race and drug addiction
such as alcoholism. In each case the perpetra-
_tor/victim buys short-term relief from his pre-
dicament at the cost of a subsequent worse pre-
_dicament which demands even more relief—‘‘I
drink to forget I’m an alcoholic.” And each
case is a battleground of fictional adversaries—
the alcoholic ‘versus’ his pride, one body of
people “versus” another.

So far the closest thing to a cure for alcohol-
ism is the ‘“‘ad hoc religion” (Gerald Heard) of
Alcoholics Anonymous, which can force the
surrender of the drinker to the fact of his alco-
holism, to the care of a Higher Power, and to
sustained care and shared responsibility with
others who've been the same route.

_ There may well be an analogous cure for the
Arms Race. Herman Kahn proposes something
of the sort-—gradual decommitment of nuclear
threat by the United States and gradual in-

crease of ecological consciousness as a religion
which taboos nuclear weapons.

It’s worth noticing that such a religion
would have to be a practice religion like Hin-
duism or Buddhism rather than a revealed reli-
gion such as Christianity or Islam. Revealed
religions generate, and probably require, ene-
mies—we’ve got the Word; you don’t; off you.
In the cause of world peace you can forget
about finding, or being, a Messiah. What’s
called for is a world set of religions of imma-
nence rather than transcendence, based on per-
sonal observation and responsibility and love of
worldly detail as the handiest handle on the in-
finite. That’s one avenue of cure. . . .

VICTORY OF THE UNDERDOG

Another avenue, less grand than religion but
still contextual, is a bit of tinkering with the
structure of the Arms Race, which can’t be
done by people busy fighting within it. It is
after all a war of anticipation. In the projected
showdown it is assumed that Biggest Gun
Wins. Therefore each side kills itself to main-
tain the Biggest Gun.

Imagine a situation in which everything is
the same, except both sides believe that Small-
est Gun Wins. In the five dollar bill auction it
would be the same as changing the rule once
the price was way up there, to “second highest
bidder wins, but I still get both bids.” Would
incremental increase change to incremental de-
crease? (It would in the changed auction if the
bidders were by now so mad at each other that
each wanted to win avd make the other guy
suffer a humiliating loss. That might be the
Arms Race solution. In the auction the first
party to really catch on and bid “‘one mill!”
would win.)

Try changing just that element. You still
have confrontation and conflict and still have
all the causes of war. Here it may be timely to
quote some of Geoffrey Blainey’s observations
from The Causes of War:

Wars usually begin when two nations disagree
on their relative strength, and wars usually cease
when the fighting nations agree on their relative
strength... .

85

Stewart Brand

Any factor which increases the likelihood that
nations will agree on their relative power 15 a poten-
tial cause of peace. One powerful cause of peace 1s a
decisive war, for war provides the most widely-ac-
cepted measure of power. . .

A formula for measuring international power is
essential: tronically the most useful formula 1s war-
fare. Until the function of warfare is appreciated,
the search for a more humane and more effucient way
of measuring power is likely to be haphazard... .

While the breakdown of diplomacy reflects the be-
lief of each nation that it will gain more by fighting
than by negotiating, the breakdown of war reflects
the belief of each nation that it will gain more by
negotiating than by fighting.

The keywords here are “gain” and “relative
strength.” Gain what? Relative strength in
what? If the only place that power comes from
is out of the barrel of a gun, then the answer is
obvious, tautologous, and insane.

But suppose it meant “gain in the eyes of
the world” and “‘relative strength of character.’
There’s no doubt you're still talking about
competition and important international
stakes, but the mode of threat and battle
might become radically different.

It’s already happening.

The underdog won in Vietnam through rela-
tive weakness of arms and strength of charac-
ter. The United States lost through strength of
arms and weakness of character. We played the
part of the bully, and in the eyes of the neigh-
borhood we were despicable. Power in South-
east Asia came from some other place than the
barrel of a gun.

You could make a similar case about Castro’s
Cuba or about Israel (to some). What’s going
on? Apparently it’s a more mercantile, less
military, world than it used to be, and infor-
mation can get around rapidly and widely
enough for there to be such a thing as World
Opinion. And rather suddenly it is powerful.
The world can put enough non-military pres-
sure On an interventionist United States ora
White-ruled Rhodesia to change behavior. It
can probably do the same thing with rewards.
(Is anyone studying that?)

What keeps the United States—Soviet Arms
Race going then? World Opinion holds both

86

?

nations in contempt for their “obscene” weap-
ons stockpiles. Well, as anyone knows who's
been around one, a psychosis has a life of its
own. I mean that pretty literally. It generates
its own universe dynamically capable of deny-
ing truths obvious to others (such as the leaders
and citizens of the insane nations). In theory
that can go on forever. In the real world it
doesn’t. Given enough contact and time the
hysterical system eventually reconnects.

If this line of argument is correct, then the
way to cure the Arms Race is to increase the
power of World Opinion and its moral author-
ity. Let it punish with bad odor and boycott
and insults to tourists any nation that relies on
massive weaponry, massive imprisonment, in-
stitutional torture, severe inequity, or other
wrongdoing. Let it revile those who gain mili-
tary victory by overwhelming force of arms.
Let it reward its gallant underdogs and its
good citizens with praise, trade, respect.

For this to work there must be swift, accu-
rate assessment of what’s actually going on in
confrontation situations. Lazy or controlled
press is a sin. Secrecy is a sin (compare World
Opinion on the Soviet and United States space
programs). Favoritism is a sin (if torture is evil
in Chile, it is evil in Rumania). Ignorance is a
sin in a different way than it used to be.

World Opinion needs better information,
more leverage, and fuller recognition of its
power. Maybe it needs something like the No-
bel Committee to articulate its views, maybe
not. Maybe it needs to establish modes of to-
ken warfare, maybe not. It probably does need
world-wide polling on issues. It does not need
a bigger gun. It does need a lot of work, which
it will reward... .

LOCAL DISARMAMENT

In American cities there is a miniature
Arms Race going on between the cops and
the robbers, egged on by TV shows such as
“S.W.A.T.” (Special Weapons and Tactics).
If what I’m saying about Arms Races is true,
the city might be an arena to test it. A gun
is like a bomb— it causes more irreversible
damage, such as death, and more innocent
victims.

Ken Kesey, the Oregon novelist who did
time in California on a dope charge, suggested
this fall that cops have too important a role in
society to rely on weapons to enforce. He cited
the history of the patient, unarmed British
bobby, who has never lost the respect of the
_ people, versus the American policeman; who
_ has never quite gotten it. A shooting in En-

_ gland remains rare enough to be front-page

_ news when it occurs.

| What if some city initiated an unarmed po-
lice squad, voluntary presumably? The patrol-
men and women would have to rely on their
wits, familiarity with their beats, neighbor-
hood help, skill in martial arts, and guts. It
would be hazardous duty. But the moral au-
thority they would acquire would be worth it.
_A lot of urban crime is by kids, a lot of it has

_ to do with pride. In a pride race the unarmed
cop is ahead.

The inevitable TV show might even be all

| right.

Nice idea maybe, but how the hell do you

/ implement it? Something like this has to be

| initiated by police somewhere, and that seems
unlikely. It'll probably never get tried.

Except it’s being tried somewhat in a town
in Orange County, California, called Santa
Ana. In the two years that Police Chief Ray
Davis has been on the job—according to a re-
| port in New West—he’s increased the force by
thirty percent (largely minorities) to a total of
327 regular officers and 129 uniformed but wn-
armed ‘‘setvice officers.” (Santa Ana’s popula-

| tion is 180,000, racially mixed.)

| The program is called COP—Community

| Oriented Policing. It “puts small teams of po-
lice officers into well-defined neighborhoods,
and encourages cops and civilians to get to
know each other.” Formerly the Santa Ana
force suffered from lousy morale and “had a

| reputation for kicking ass and taking names.
They were quick to draw and fire their guns in
delicate situations.”

_ Result after two years? Serious crime was re-
duced 20.7% last year, replacing the former
yearly increase. Forcible rape was down 53.6%
in the first nine months of 1976. Officer-in-
volved shootings are down 60%. Morale is up.

How to Run the Arms Race Backwards

One patrol officer comments, “I wouldn’t work
anywhere else in the country—they might
have new patrol cars every year, but they don’t
have kids coming up and calling you by your
fiest tame? te 23"

THE GRAIN OF INTELLIGENCE

“Grain” as in coarse-grained or fine-grained.

It means the size of the perceptible texture. If
there is an underlying message in the array of
Whole Earth publications it is, “Think Little’:
live fine-grained.

You can see it in a New York skyscraper—
a dazzling intellectual achievement of size and
design. But when you look close there is little
to admire—nothing quite works. The design
intelligence is elsewhere, congratulating itself
up on top maybe. Modern strategic and tacti-
cal weapons are astonishing instruments, inter-
esting to analyze, fun to play with. But actual
war conducted with them is more brutal than
anything we've ever known. The intelligence
of war, except for espionage and guerrilla ac-
tivity, is now grossly coarse-grained.

Is that bad? It is if war is meant to be some
measure of a people’s character. There is no
place for a samurai code or a fighting sailor’s
heart-of-oak in an arsenal or conflict of inter-
continental missiles. Those are merely a mea-
sure of wealth, which is the opposite of
character.

Maybe war can be abolished. I doubt it. But
it can surely be made human again by revalu-
ing its conduct. If people want to fight, and
some do, let them do it hand to hand or prove
their case with sailing ships and unrifled can-
non, where only innocent waves are shattered
by missed shots, and the valor of the combat-
ants makes the difference.

I'm not kidding.

The rule of grain is: If you take care only of
abstractions, the details will defeat you; if you
take care of the details, the abstractions will
take care of themselves. . . .

REFERENCES

Steve Baer, “The Bomb,” The CoEvolution Quarterly,
Summer, 1976.

Frank Barnaby, “Soviet Scientists and Disarmament,”
New Scientist, 13 January 1977.

87

Stewart Brand

Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory
of Alcoholism,” Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972,
Ballantine.

Gerald Heard, The Five Ages of Man, 1963, Julian Press.

Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 1973, Macmillan.

Jonathan Kirsch, ‘Street Crime—A Tale of Two Cities/
Santa Ana: Turning the Numbers Around,” New West, 17

January 1977.

LETTER TO ALL EDITORS
You don’t win by killing, because they kill you
back. You don’t win by growing, because you
grow too big, and fall over. You don’t win by
spending, because you spend too much, leay-
ing only that percentage which is either stolen
or imaginary. You don’t win by winning, but
living.
Sincerely,
David Wann
Indian Hills, Colorado
{Summer 1982]

WHY WE SHOULD DROP THE BOMBS

it would be so exciting
it would be so powerful
it would punish us for our sins
things wouldn’t be so boring anymore
we could get back to basics
we would remember who we love
it would be so loud
it would be so hot
the mushroom clouds would rise up
we could start over
we wouldn’t have to be afraid of it anymore
we wouldn't have to be afraid anymore
we would finally have done it

better than Raskolnikov

88

it would release our anger
in the ultimate tantrum
then we could rest
—Alia Johnson
{Fall 1981}

Alia Johnson lives in Berkeley, works night and day to defuse
the Arms Race. Her method is truth, sampled here.
SB

POLITICAL EYEPATCHES

Two recent newspaper items report:

1. That if an H-bomb went off (for in-
stance) in the Boston area anyone within a
forty-mile radius unfortunate enough to be
looking in its direction at the time would be
blinded by retina burn.

2. That the pilot of the Air Force’s SAC
flying command post wears an eye patch at all
times so he’ll have sight in one eye when/after
he gazes at an H-bomb going off somewhere
above the United States.

Whether people should want to survive into
the chaos post-nuclear-war may be moot, but
survival b/ind may be just that straw that
breaks the camel’s back.

I'm suggesting that the eye patch, black as
ink, might be an excellent symbol for public
display by those who’d like to protest nuclear
idiocy, unforgettable if worn by hundreds or
thousands at a gathering, and yet a protective
item of substance: real theater.

Think of Israel’s Dayan, that Man in the
Hathaway shirt and many, many more all come
to town on the very same day.

Charles Pierce
Dunedin, Florida
{Spring 1981}

HERMAN KAHN

GOV. JERRY BROWN

AMORY LOVINS

The New Class

H

_ Edmund G. Brown, Jr., governor of

California from 1974 to 1982, was

_ the best interviewer CQ ever had.
_ The breadth of his Jesuit education,

the quickness of his wit and tongue,
and the consequence of his under-
standing as innovative leader of the
nation’s bellwether state drew the
very best from people. In our pages
he vivisected the ideas of Gregory
Bateson, Marshall McLuhan,

_ Thomas Szasz, and the indomitable

~ Herman Kahn. They, and other visi-

tors such as Buckminster Fuller, Ken
Kesey, Ivan Illich, James Watson
(The Double Helix), E. F. Schu-
macher, Hazel Henderson, and Wen-
dell Berry gave lunchtime talks in
the governor’s council room to an au-
dience of staff, cabinet, and depart-
ment heads. One of my roles on the
governor's staff was setting up these
visits and talks. This one was held on
December 1, 1976; its edited tran-
script was printed in the Spring
1977 CQ.

Herman Kahn, who died in 1983
at sixty-three, was to American po-
litical intellectuals (to quote from

my original introduction), “what
Tom Wolfe is to the journalists.
Both immerse themselves like an-
thropologists in field experience and
impressions and let their perception
grow from that rather than strictly
from ideology. As a result, they are
more open, less predictable, and far
more informative than your standard
idealogue. When it comes to politi-
cal, social, military, or economic
analysis, there is no view I’m more
interested in than Kahn’s. In addi-
tion—and this may or may not come
across in print—Kahn has an engag-
ing charm and wit in person that
makes even hostile audiences laugh
with him. Of the fifteen or so lec-
tures at the governor’s office this was
the most hilarious.”

Amory Lovins is still the stan-
dard-bearer for energy-conscious
environmentalism. His trilogy of
books, World Energy Strategies, Non-
Nuclear Futures, and Soft Energy Paths
make the best-documented, well-ar-
gued and persuasive case for an en-
ergy-conservative world. Shortly be-
fore this interview, he published in
Foreign Affairs (October, 1976) a
landmark paper, ‘““The Road Not
Taken.”

Stewart Brand

For space reasons, I edited out about
a third of the printed interview in
CQ—which itself was about one-
fourth of the original eight-hour
transcript. I left out some of their
political discussion, which has dated

89

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

since; Kahn’s ideas about the New
Class and the state of Western cul-
ture, and the others’ responses,
stayed in. In the original transcript
there was still more quantitative dia-
logue between Lovins and Kahn—an
entire separate debate on percents of
inflation, thousands of cubic feet of
natural gas, and quadrillions of
BTUs. Wrote Stewart, “My mythic
image is of the pair advancing on
each other in a dusty street, the big
trail-boss and the canny squirt from
the city, hands poised above their
pocket calculators. Lovins in fact
does carry his in a holster. Kahn

packs two.”
Art Kleiner

HERMAN KAHN: We have two studies going
on at the Hudson Institute today which I find
terribly interesting. The first 1s on the New
Class, being done by Barry Bruce-Briggs and
others, including myself. Let me define the
New Class for you. The term was coined by
Milovan Djilas to mean the upper levels of Yu-

goslav intelligentsia, who he felt were ripping
off the country. We’re not using it that way,
but it’s close. In our sense, the term is used by
Bazelon, by Podhoretz, by Kristol, a few oth-
ers. It was also noticed by Marxists and you'll
find lots of references during the last hundred
years to this concept.

Think of a group of people who come from
upper-middle-class backgrounds, from fami-
lies who are largely education-oriented, so they
see that the children go to the good schools and
who, after they get out of the schools, earn
their living by the use of academic skills, lan-
guage skills, esthetic skills, analytical skills.
They don’t earn their living by being entrepre-
neurs, businessmen, engineers, laborers, cleri-
cal workers. If you are staff here, you are prob-
ably New Class to some extent.

Now, we are defining a class. Classes are
never homogeneous. You must understand that
people can assimilate into a class. They don’t
have to have the same ethnic origins as the ma-
jority. We’ve put together a fair amount of evi-
dence, part of it just anecdotal, arguing that
the New Class in the United States largely has
the following religious backgrounds: secular
Jewish, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Epis-

Till 2 A.M. in the Governor’s office. Left to right, Amory Lovins, Herman Kahn, Elizabeth Coleman
(Governor’s press secretary), Jim Harding (assistant to the Energy Commission), Jerry Brown, and Gray
Davis (Brown’s Chief of Staff). Photographs by Stewart Brand.

90

The New Class

copalian, northern Methodist, Quaker, Unitar-

ian, and haute-bourgeois Catholic.

This group preserves the division in Ameri-
can history which goes back about 150 years.
The basic reigning doctrine of the New Class
first emerged in the mid-1870s, the Transcen-
dentalists—Emerson, Thoreau, people.like
that. If you read them today, a remarkably
high percent of their writing reads like it was
written by Marcuse. It’s a doctrine which be-
lieves in the Unitarian faith: there is at most

_ one God, and we worship Him if He exists.
It’s a hedge.

This is an increasing class in the United
States. They came into power with the Ken-
nedy administration, in the early ’6os. They
went sort of crazy in the mid-’6os, and this
brings me to the second book I’m writing:
1965-1975, A Decade of Social Malaise and Ed-

) ucated Incapacity. Let me take the second term

first. It comes from Thorstein Veblen, who

_ used the term “trained incapacity’ —by which
he meant many things, among which was an

_ inability of engineers and sociologists to deal

_ with simple issues which they could have dealt

_ with if they had not had graduate training. Is

Herman Kahn

the concept clear? “Educated incapacity” is a
much more pervasive kind of thing, where
your whole educational outlook, starting with
your upbringing, childhood, everything,
makes it almost impossible for you to deal with
most of the obvious points of American social
life today.

Now let me test your skill as politicians.
There’s a certain individual in American po-
litical life from roughly 1967 to about 1973
whom something like eighty to ninety percent
of the American people claimed they admired
for speaking out on the issues of their lives that
bothered them the most. Now eighty to ninety
percent is a pretty high percent, right? So you
ought to be able to know this individual. How
many people know, with a reasonable degree of
confidence, who I’m talking about? Yes?

VOICE: George Wallace.

KAHN: I’m going to hate you the rest of
your life. Normally, with audiences like this,
you can really squeeze them. You can say,
“Come on, you must know who eighty to
ninety percent of the American people know.”

This is not necessarily a good thing. Eric
Hoffer commented upon it by saying, ““There’s

91

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

something sick about a country in which only a
southern racist cracker can deal with the is-
sues.”’ Now that’s a fair statement. That’s an
indication of social malaise, among other
things.

Now, we have a list of about twelve issues of
American life that are formally characteristic.
About eighty percent of Americans understand
these issues quite well. They don’t learn these
from newspapers. If you read the New York
Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Har-
per’s, Atlantic Monthly, and to the extent that
they discussed these issues at all (except when
they had a guest editorial once in a while, or an
outsider or a temporary post-election attitude)
they never explored these twelve issues. First,
there’s law and order. From ’61 to ’65 all these
magazines claimed that this was a code word
for anti-Negro. Remember that? We couldn’t
find a single demagogue who used it that way.
Wallace would give you his position on the
Blacks, and then would talk about law and or-
der. He couldn’t use it as a code word, because
he’d already given you his position. Half the
Blacks in the cities put law and order as the
top issue in their lives. They couldn't use code
words either. In other words, people under-
stood what they were talking about. There was
a big increase in crime, a good deal of it was
young Black crime—it’s been actually over-
stated how much of it was that, but a lot of it
was. The liberals couldn’t cope with it.

Or take busing. We’ve bused in this country
since roughly 1908, I think. Mostly to better
schools. In the South they bused to maintain
segregation. What do you think a real estate
agent told you, the first thing he could, when
you were trying to buy a house? Neighborhood
schools. If you check you'll find that the aver-
age American was willing to pay five, ten, fif-
teen percent more for a house if he thought it
had good neighborhood schools in the area. He
was always willing to bus his kids to better
schools, but he was willing to pay a big hunk
of his wealth for neighborhood schools.

You have a democracy in this country. You
have a long tradition of public control of edu-
cation. Right? We’re about to change this, I
suspect. Now, in the South, they committed a

92

legal crime—de jure segregation, and you
could punish them. In the North there’s no
such legal crime committed. What do you
think of a policy of trying to bus children

long distances to bad schools in this kind of
context? Do you think such a policy could suc-
ceed? Long distances to bad schools? I’m not
talking about busing Blacks into the good
schools, I’m talking about busing children to
schools they judge to be bad. Let me tell you,
you ve got to be a fool to try it. You can destroy
neighborhoods by the way, if you want, but
you ve got to be crazy. You can’t play with
children that way. Now, you may say that the
people who oppose the busing are generally
bigoted people, and that’s correct. And so are
people who don’t oppose the busing. Bigotry is
a Class characteristic in the United States. You
know Archie Bunker in “All In the Family’?
He is a very good picture of the average Ameri-
can. And, by the way, the average American is
pleased with that picture. I’ve talked to Nor-
man Lear. He says they kill themselves to have
Archie come out backwards, and they can’t do
it.

English libel law applies here. If you say
something about an individual, and it’s nasty,
and there’s no reason to say it, and it’s false,
you pay damages. If it’s true, you pay triple
damages, because the truth is so much more
damaging. That’s the way the average Ameri-
can feels about it. He knows he’s a bigot, and
it’s none of your business. They’re not very big-
oted, the American public. Say you ask the av-
erage American, “Which would you rather
cut, NASA’s Space Budget or the Relief Bud-
get.”” Which do you think he would postpone?
He thinks of Relief as a boondoggle for
Blacks. He thinks of NASA as a boondoggle
for scientists. He likes scientists and he’s sort
of hostile to Blacks. But Blacks are at least
people. Really, his hostilities are very low-
level.

I want to address a very important issue.
Why ts it that the New Class seems to get
everything wrong today? Here I differ from my
colleague, Barry Bruce-Briggs. I believe the
single major problem of the New Class is edu-
cated incapacity—they just don’t know what

The New Class

they're doing. He thinks that it’s self-interest.

And he talks about Brevor’s concept of interest

_ affinities—people make the mistakes which fa-

vor them. It’s just sort of natural. Let’s look at
the self-interest issue. One thing is terribly
clear in the United States today, and in all
Western cultures: the New Class is spending
more and enjoying it less. In fact they are
going down as their numbers increase.

The basic point seems to be the following.
If you had 10 million cars, as you had in 1950,

_ and you owned one, it was great. Now you

have 110 million cars, and you're got traffic
jams. One of the most interesting characteris-
tics of the New Class is an absolutely manic
hostility toward automobiles. It has to be seen
to be believed. We told the automobile compa-

nies that they would have a lot of trouble sell-

ing small cars in America. The most typical
activity of the average American is picnicking,
camping, visiting relatives. He’s got three
children, a dog, and a bike. You just don’t put
that into a Volkswagen. You give him a Volks-
wagen, you just cut out the heart of his life-

| style. He’s not going to stand for it. Why
should he? He also believes the big cars are

safer. The data’s now with him: he’s right.
The New Class has an agenda. What is their

_ agenda? Number one is risk aversion. In the

New Class theology the only real value is hu-
man life. You’re never entitled to risk human
life. It gets to be kind of manic. The risk aver-
sion is pushed to the point where you're run-
ning bigger risks.

Take, for example, the issue of chemicals in
insecticides. Today we know pretty much how
to do biological insecticides—we don’t really
know, but we’re at the verge. In order to really
understand this, you’ve got to commercialize it
and try it out. Now, it turns out that the gov-

ernment authorities are insisting on the same
_ kinds of tests with the biological insecticides

as exist for the chemical pesticides. These are
very expensive, and for a number of reasons,

incapacitating. The manufacturers are drop-

ping out of business rather than try to go

through these tests. The manufacturers took
the position: these are all natural substances,
we ve had experiences with them, how much

damage can they do? They want to go back to
the old rule that the government has to prove
its case. (Incidentally, it’s apparently impossi-
ble to prove safety. There’s no experiment you
can do which will viably prove safety. All you
can prove is damage.) The whole business of
medical malpractice is a similar matter.

The next single biggest characteristic of the
New Class is localism. Let me ask you this:
How many of you believe in unrestricted de-
velopment for your personal neighborhood?
Would you raise your hands please? Nobody
does. Now, I want an honest answer. How
many define “unrestricted development” as any
development which ts not in your favor? On
the East and the West Coast: almost every-
body. Not in the Midwest, not in the southern
United States, not in the Southwest. They
don’t understand the question. They have a
perfectly clear concept that you can’t cut the
ladder after you.

I can give you a list of about twenty items
on the agenda of the New Class. Every one of
them is very hostile to the middle class, espe-
cially to the upper middle class. Every single
one of them. So we define politics in the
United States in an oversimplified fashion: a
war of the New Class versus the middle class.
New Class versus working class. When you
look at politics that way, everything falls into
place.

I myself am obviously New Class. The New
Class is about fifty percent of what we call neo-
liberal. You remember the old liberals—lais-
sez-faire, let us alone, let us make do by our-
selves? Then you had the concept of govern-
ment intervention to make the market work
better. Then you had the concept of govern-
ment intervention to make the income distri-
bution, income maintenance better. Now
you've got government intervention by what
we call the health and safety fascist. He doesn’t
give a damn about your morals—you can screw
in public ona stage, he couldn’t care less—but
you can’t smoke. And then he calls everybody
else a materialist.

I happen to like the middle-class American.
I think very well of him. And as I get older I
identify more and more with him, with his

3

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

virtues and so on. I don’t want to romanticize
him. Actually, on many issues my wife and I
are incredibly middle class. [ll give you an ex-
ample of what I mean by this. My daughter
came home at fourteen, and at that time she
couldn’t date. She was allowed to go out with
boys, but she couldn’t define it as a heterosex-
ual relationship. She brought home this boy
and was holding hands in the living room.
And when the boy left, my wife and I turned
to her and we said, ‘““What’s this nonsense of
holding hands in the living room?” She was
shocked. She said, “Do you want me to do it
behind your back?” And I said, “Absolutely.”
She said, “Isn’t that hypocrisy?” I said, “Yes.
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. If
you don’t know enough to do that at fourteen,
you haven't been socialized.”’ And she got ter-
ribly puzzled. I said, “Debbie, do me a very
big favor. In the next four or five years you can
do all kinds of things. But if I catch you at it,
you re in very serious trouble. If you don’t do
it, ’ll send you to a psychiatrist. Now is there
any problem about the kind of behavior that’s
expected?” I went around and made some
speeches in the local high school on hypocrisy.
The kids had it right, they understood it, the
teachers didn’t. The kids were clear on every
nuance, 2 .

WOMAN'S VOICE: I was interested in what
you meant by the morality of the New Class.

KAHN: Part of it is traditional. Through-
out all of American history the upper middle
class has tried to force its values on the coun-
try. I would argue that up to about twenty
years ago that was a good thing. They were
the squares, they were the ones against vice,
against thievery, for raising children clean,
you know. They wouldn’t stand for bringing
the language of the streets into the schools.
Today the upper middle class has reversed its
values completely.

You know something? If you saw a hippie
anywhere in the world before say ’72, you
know what he was? He was Scandinavian,
Dutch, English, American, or Canadian. Once
in a while Protestant sector of Germany. There

were almost no Catholic hippies raised in Cath-

olic countries. It’s completely a phenomenon

94

of Japan and the Atlantic Protestant culture
(not Swiss culture, which is also Protestant; it
has none of this phenomenon).

Take a look at Holland. You know how peo-
ple blame much of this phenomenon in the
United States on the race problems, on pov-
erty, on the Vietnamese war, and so on? Hol-
land has no race problems, no poverty, no pol-
lution except water from the outside, no
Vietnam. They have a drug culture which is
much worse than ours; their provos are much
more violent and even get elected to the city
councils; they have an alienation that has to be
seen to be believed. This has nothing to do
with Vietnam, or poverty, or race, or ugliness.
It has to do with a problem possessed by every
member of the Protestant culture except
Switzerland.

The Protestant culture I’m talking about
here (except for England) used to have a kind of
manic love affair with God. And then they be-
came manic atheists. What do I mean by
manic atheists? Any totem, any taboo, any-
thing that’s irrational or arational in our lives,
they're hostile to. In other words they don’t
understand the need for this kind of a thing.

I have a theory of culture which is not docu-
mented, but I’ve noticed the following: if you
go to the South Pacific islands where there was
no pressure by the physical environment on the
society, the psychological environment was
made unbelievably hostile. They have the most
complicated taboos, most complicated dangers
you ve ever seen in your life. And life is terrify-
ing. There are magicians, and they can raise
boils on you. Why? I have a belief that if the
physical environment doesn’t give you struc-
ture, then the psychological environment must
replace it—that you have to have structure.

Let me ask the following question: there are
two basic views of humanity, the Pelagian
view and the Augustinian. The Pelagian view
can be summarized, there are no bad children,
only bad parents. If you fix the environment,
the kid grows up naturally well. The New
Class is Pelagian. The Augustinian view is the
child is basically evil. How many of you are
Augustinian? Have you ever noticed a baby?
They're not known for tolerance, moderation.

The New Class

Babies will destroy the universe if they’re em-
powered. Probably the most intelligent, well-
_ thought-through Augustinian we know of is

| Freud. Now Freud said three things in Vienna:
1, Civilization is repression; 2, You must’so-

_ cialize that child at any cost; 3, Having ac-

_ cepted the first two theses, how do you reduce
the cost? Now, that’s all that America heard,

_ was point number three.

_ Let me close this with just one other exam-
ple. I have a friend of mine, his name is Gor-

_ don Dewey. He’s a grandson of John Dewey,

_ and I mentioned to him about four or five years
_ ago that his grandfather really caused eighty
percent of the problem. He said he’s tired of

_ hearing that (he believes it too, by the way).

_ But he made a point which I'd never really
understood before. He said, “Look, my grand-
| father was raised in New England. Their char-
_ acter tends to freeze like the stones, the rocks.
| And the problem is, how do you loosen them
_up a little bit? How do you get a little joy, a

_ little creativity, a little spontaneity, a little

|. flexibility? How was he to know the rest of the
_ country was slobs?”

_ JERRY BROWN: You say that the New Class
| Is growing in Protestant Western society,
which a hundred years ago, someone wrote,

| was the reason why we had an industrial

_ revolution.

KAHN: I believe that’s right.

BROWN: OK. So first you get the Industrial
_ Revolution, then we create all this wealth.

| That generates this by-product called the New
Class. The New Class is growing in strength.

' It seems to me that the curve you’re plotting

| shows that the country politically or techno-

| logically collapses in ten or fifteen years, and

| some other more retarded country takes over

| because they don’t have the burden of this New
| Class that is produced by all the technological

| progress.

_ KAHN: That may happen. I would say: even
| money it happens. But it’s not the only sce-
nario. It has happened in England, remember.
_ England was the one that started all of this.

_ England has always had very much a New

_ Class atmosphere in the upper classes. And En-
_ gland’s in serious trouble. If we were in the old

Amory Lovins

system, with wars and things like that, En-
gland I’m sure would be taken out.

It’s hard to imagine that in the United
States, we are just so rich. You can mismanage
this country for decades and not get into seri-
ous trouble, and that’s the problem, by the
way. Because if you could see the effects of
your mismanagement, you wouldn't do it.
Municipalities can see it. Every municipality I
know of has changed its attitudes because of
New York. But there’s no such phenomenon in
the Federal Government.

We've made a distinction between what we
call the Athenian, French, Chinese type cul-
ture, where you’re going to be able to have a
great deal of wealth and safety without any
collapse, and what we call the Spartan, Ro-
man, United States type culture, where wealth
and safety seem to bring a kind of collapse.

BROWN: Yeah, but Athens collapsed.

KAHN: Athens was beaten, but it was very
hard to beat Athens. The only people around
who could beat the Athenians were the Spar-
tans and Romans. Nobody else. If there were

95

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

Gov. Jerry Brown

no Spartans or Romans around it was safe to be
an Athenian. That’s one of the points, by the
way. If there are Spartans and Romans around,
it’s not safe to be Athenian.

BROWN: The Athenians beat themselves.
They kept fighting with their neighbors.

KAHN: Until they tangled with Sparta they
won most of their wars. Now that’s a clue. On
the way up these Spartan and Roman, United
States, English cultures are really ferocious.
But when they get there they have a tendency
to collapse. Don’t tangle with them on the way
up, wait ‘til they get there. Now, the Romans
didn’t actually do that, so it’s kind of interest-
ing. The Romans adopted about ten things in
order to prevent themselves from collapsing.
(The Spartans did collapse, needless to say.)
First of all the Romans Athenized. You re-
member the Virgil poem, “We conquered thee
and in turn were conquered by thee’? They se-
lected from Athens those elements of the
Athenian culture which enabled them to live
with safety and wealth. Augustus, for exam-
ple, had a conscious concept of creating moral-
ity. Remember, “He found Rome great and
left it moral”? They were religiously square. It
used to shock the Greeks, when they visited
Rome, to find that it was a religious culture.

96

The United States is a religious culture. If
you look at the square religions—Baptist,
Church of Christ, Pentecostal, Orthodox Cath-
olic, Orthodox Jewish, Mormon—they’re all
on the increase in the United States, did you
know that? The only one that’s been noticed by
the newspapers is the Jesus Freaks. Why are
they noticed? Because they’re the children of
the newspaper reporters. One of the reasons
why I think the United States is basically in
good shape is this increase in orthodox square
religions. There’s been an enormous decrease
in the transcendental religions, the New Class
religions.

VOICE: How long has this religion increase
been going on?

KAHN: About a decade.

VOICE: Well, how do you tie that into
Vietnam?

KAHN: You think of Vietnam as being
immoral?

VOICE: Well, isn’t true religion not drop-
ping bombs on little brown people?

KAHN: That’s your picture of the war, it
wasn’t theirs. Look, if there have been any peo-
ple who’ve been able to kill with a great deal of
ease, it’s any religious movement at a high
point in its career. They kill in wholesale
amounts. They’ve never had any problem ra-
tionalizing it. You may have a picture of reli-
gious peace, but I don’t have that picture at
all. We think of messianic movements as the
most dangerous things in the world, barring
nothing. .. .

BROWN: Hello again. If anybody’s getting
hungry they told me we’ve got some food here.
{Adjourn to a vegetarian dinner in the Governor’s
study. Gray Davis and Elizabeth Coleman have
joined the group. Kahn has nothing but a cup of cof-
fee. The tape recorder keeps listening. }

KAHN: . . . In the very long run I would
make a guess that as food is manufactured,
people will adapt to it. In the United States to-
day two out of three people prefer oleomargar-
ine at the same price as butter because they
were raised on it. It takes about a generation
or two to change food habits. Now, that will
never be true, I’ll bet you, in France, even 300
years from now.

The New Class

Herman Kahn

_ _LOvINS: I gather that in United States mar-
_ kets for all sort of commodities now people are

| tending to prefer real to synthetic things and

_ good to poor quality.

KAHN: That’s not the same thing. There's a
_ general desire for improved quality everywhere
in the United States—people are richer and
_ want to live better. Again, in the New Class,

| higher quality is equated with something

called “natural.”
BROWN: Like we're eating now.
KAHN: Exactly.
BROWN: Well, the hot lunch program in

| schools works better with McDonald’s ham-

_ burgers than it does with dietetic lunches pre-

_ pared by professionals.

KAHN: McDonald’s is an incredibly well-de-

_ signed place. There’s an article in Public Interest
on just how intelligently they designed the
thing. Now, McDonald’s has become one of
those symbols of the upper class versus the
middle class—like the car versus the bike, or
the Cadillac versus the Mercedes. McDonald's
understands American taste very well. But
more than that they understand how to run a
restaurant. They keep the floors absolutely

spotless, you may have noticed. And every-
thing is done very close to the people serving,
so they never feel hectic, they never feel
pressed. They actually throw away hamburgers
which have been cold for a certain length of
time, so everybody’s impressed with their own
quality control. They have a high-morale crew
and you never get that harried character of a
short order cook.

LOVINS: Somehow that doesn’t square with
accounts of some of my friends who have
worked in McDonald’s.

KAHN: I assume your friends who worked in
McDonald’s were New Class.

LOVINS: Do you believe there’ll be any slow-
ing down of what you call square value
systems?

KAHN: There’s no question there’s been a
big change. It’s illustrated by the movie Love
Story, which is the epitome of a square movie
from a square book. It’s a best-seller in every
language. There’s a nude scene. You couldn't
have shown a nude scene in a square movie
twenty years ago. They use four-letter words
freely. She dies of cancer. You couldn’t die of
cancer in an American movie twenty years ago.
They have intercourse before marriage, and
neither gets punished.

LOVINS: I’m still missing the sense of real
people with real motives in your picture of the
middle class.

KAHN: I’m giving you a list of things which
are terribly important to people. Now, none
of them may be important to you, but that
doesn’t make them any less real or less impor-
tant to the people concerned. Now, the upper-
middle-class family would not prepare its chil-
dren to accept with equanimity and fortitude
the unfairness of life, like being crippled, say.
Let me give you an example of this. One of our
staff guys who is square—the guy’s a pilot—
has a very beautiful daughter, eighteen. She
was in an accident in Spain, and she’s perma-
nently crippled now. She was a musician: she
really had a nice career in front of her. Her
mother went to the hospital, and the daughter
said, “Why should this happen to me? Why
should this happen to me?” Which is a ques-
tion, you know. And the mother answered her,

oF

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

Amory Lovins and Herman Kahn

“T never told you that life was fair.”’ A very
tactful remark. “You never heard that from
your father, you never heard that from me, you
never heard that from the preacher. It hap-
pened.” And you know something, it’s
changed the girl’s attitude. She’s learning how
to use her legs mechanically. Before that con-
versation she was thinking in terms of suicide.
They teach their children that way. Things
happen. Life is not fair. That’s a terribly im-
portant value lesson.

LOVINS: My Ukrainian grandmother used to
say, ‘Life is an onion. You peel it bit by bit,
and sometimes cry.”

KAHN: Yeah, exactly. Now, to a remarkable
degree, the upper-middle-class kid is raised
without any clue of that. It’s never mentioned
to him that life is unfair.

BRAND: In the other room, Governor, Her-
man was allowing as to how he doesn’t con-
sider you New Class.

BROWN: I don’t think you know. I haven’t
said enough yet.

KAHN: I don’t know, but you have a style of
calling a spade a shovel, which is very much
not New Class.

98

LOVINS: I thought they were called terres-
trial improvement implements.

KAHN: That is New Class. Of all the societ-
ies that I know of, America is the least class-
conscious, except the Chinese society.

BROWN: But you're saying there’s this New
Class.

KAHN: Yeah, which is getting its self-con-
sciousness. In order to be a class you have to be
self-conscious. The New Class was not a class
in the early Gos, because they didn’t think of
themselves as a group. Now they think of
themselves as a group—the Sierra Club, the
World Council of Churches, the League of
Women Voters, Common Cause, all these
things—they are the enlightened Americans,
the people who care.

LOVINS: Essentially, the people who don’t
agree with you.

KAHN: No, come on. Do you think I’m
making up the whole phenomenon? I’m New
Class myself, incidentally.

LOVINS: I think you're in a class by yourself.

KAHN: No, I’m neo-conservative. I tend to
confuse the discussion a little bit by taking the
neo-liberal part of the New Class and using

The New Class

them for the whole, which is not a bad thing,
because they are the most prominent part of
the New Class. The whole Public Interest crowd
would be New Class but very much not neo-
liberal. Sometimes my friends ask, what do I

_ mean by neo-conservative? Well, I’m conserva-

tive, but you can’t trust me.

What I don’t like about the New Class is the
way they push the squares around. They have a
total contempt for the square religions, dog-
matic religions. You notice how the reporters
just couldn’t cope with Carter being a twice-
born Baptist? They just ignored it. They
couldn’t handle it.

Take the hunting issue. I used to do talks at
Harvard. I would ask the kids, “How many of
you have three guns at home?” About thirty
percent of the class would raise their hands.
And IJ asked the others, ‘““Why do they have
three guns?”” No one knew—shoot blacks, pro-
tect against the government? I turned to the
thirty percent and I said, “How many of you
got your .22 at the age of twelve, plus or mi-
nus six months?” Every hand goes up. ‘““How

| many got your shotgun at fourteen, plus or

minus one year?”’ Ninety percent of the hands

| went up. “How many got a .30-caliber at six-

teen, plus or minus a year?” Eighty percent of
the hands go up. I’m trying to teach the other
guys they don’t know anything about their,
own country. You ask them, “What’s going

| on?” They don’t know.

You live in a hunting culture. The best way
to understand a good deal of America is to look
at it as a hunting culture. Take a place like the
Hudson Institute. Thirty-five staff members:
one hunter. Twenty-two subprofessionals:
twenty-one hunters. The twenty-second has

_ constant pressure on him to hunt. I checked
| also with twenty-two taxi drivers in town. All
_ of them are hunters. Every school teacher who

is local is a hunter, none of the imported school
teachers. None of them. It’s a two-class society

_ in the United States. But hunting is the clue.

| The rich hunt, the upper middle class doesn’t,
_ and the middle class hunts, and everybody who
_ is rural hunts.

If I had to ask myself, what’s the single big-

gest problem in the United States, I would say,
we tranquilize our children. The hunters
don’t. The key to the raising of a square Amer-
ican with the kind of character structure I
want to talk about is the hunting culture. Let
me give you an example. When my son was fif-
teen, my wife and I were having a big week-
end, she wanted to call her mother to babysit
for him. I said, ““You can’t babysit a fifteen-
year-old boy. You just can’t do it.” And she
said, “He'll burn the house down.” I said,
“You're absolutely right. But he must be given
the opportunity.”’ She won the argument, of
course, and the grandmother came.

We happened to doa small study, not a
study but just sort of a quick look, at this issue
of when do you give children responsibility. In
most cultures it’s twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
Henry the Fifth was his father’s general at the
age of fourteen, ran the War on Wales. He was
actually a general. Alexander Hamilton was
the master of a ship at sixteen, took a ship
from New York to Cuba and back. Washington
surveyed the western state of Virginia at seven-
teen, ran an attack against a French fort at
nineteen. Roughly the age of responsible jobs
ran around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. And I
happen to believe that if you defer maturity,
you never catch up. My wife said, by the way,
“But notice something, none of them was left
alone at night.” The grandmother comes.

Notice what happens to half of America.
You're given a .22 at twelve. You can kill
somebody with a .22. It’s a dangerous weapon,
right? And you could kill somebody with it.
That kid is trained to use that .22 if he’s ina
rural area. Somebody, an older brother or a
Black in the South, will give him nearly two
years of training on how to make a camp,
break a camp, use the gun—very low accident
rate, nearly negligible. At fourteen he’s given a
shotgun. Now, you can kill several people with
a shotgun. At sixteen he’s given a .30 caliber.
He’s trained, you know, to be a man, witha
man’s responsibilities, and a man’s capabilities
for damage.

Do you know why the voting age is twenty-
one in most countries? Because they thought

29

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

you shouldn’t vote until you’d been an adult
for seven years. Voting was for the older, more
responsible people. Twenty-one was not their
idea of adulthood. You’re an adult at fourteen,
but that doesn’t mean you have a right to vote
in the councils of the nation! You know what is
the nuttiest New Class project ever made? The
American Civil Liberties Union decided about
four years ago to liberate the last minority in
America which ts still enslaved, and this turns
out to be children under eighteen, who basi-
cally have no rights. And they wanted to give
the kids a lawyer. I explained that you can’t
run a family if the kid has a lawyer. It can’t be
done. No way. Well, it turns out you can ina
New Class family because it has a more com-
plicated family structure. You can’t run a mid-
dle-class family if the kid’s got a lawyer, let me
assure you.

BROWN: You'd have to have three lawyers.

KAHN: I was asked by Justice Burger to give
a talk to a meeting he had in Milwaukee that
was supposed to be fifty years after Comte’s lec-
ture on the ‘Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction
with the Law.” So I read the document, and it
reads very well today. It says the one thing that
people can’t stand is to treat the law as a game
with rules. There are three kinds of model of
legal process. One is a due process model—
everything should proceed according to due
process. There’s a crime-control model. This is
where you keep the criminals down. And then
there’s a kind of a justice model, how often do
you convict the innocent and how often do you
let the guilty go. A kind of efficiency model.
It’s obvious that any system has to balance all
three problems—efficiency, crime control, and
due process. I would argue that our system has
sort of gone manic on the due process.

LOVINS: I think that instead of efficiency
equity might be closer.

KAHN: Yes, equity’s better, although with
equity you might let the guilty free.

BROWN: I think the saying is, “It’s better
for 100 guilty to go free than the one innocent
man be punished.”

KAHN: I’m in the ten to one ratio.

BROWN: If there was a social compact that

IOO

basically threads everybody together, then
these rules would occupy a smaller part of the
whole network by which people relate. Now,
as this social compact appears to be breaking
down a bit, then more and more rules are
needed to glue everybody together.

KAHN: I think that’s right.

BRAND: Kropotkin goes the other way. He
says you get more rules, and then the social
contract breaks down.

BROWN: But I think you need more rules as
the informal and internalized rules become less
effective.

KAHN: Part of it is a lack of understanding
on how rules work. I don’t know of any organi-
zation which can work by the rules and oper-
ate. The rules are simply not there for rigid
compliance. They’re only guidelines. And they
also work in a funny way—if you violate the
rule, you do it at your risk. It’s a little bit like
my daughter—“] simply am not going to ap-
prove of you fooling around with boys, but I’m
going to be very unhappy if you don’t.” It has
that kind of a tension in it. There’s a lot of aca-
demic studies you'll see in which a guy goes
around with a cop and he notices that the cop
is violating the rules three or four times a day
and he’s startled. They never ask the question,
could the cop do his job if he didn’t violate the
rules?

BROWN: So how do you project all this? If
these rules are obviously changing. . .

KAHN: If you have a system which believes
it’s legitimate, which believes it’s working
well, you can get away with these kind of
changes. But if you have a system that teaches
the kids that it’s illegitimate, then you have
problems. How do you do that? First of all,
the way you teach history. There are three ways
to teach history. One is traditional—there
were giants in those days, their like will never
be seen again. (A rather good description; I ac-
cept it.) There’s a second way to teach his-
tory—clash of interest groups. The farmer
against the rancher, both against the railroad,
the west against the east, the bankers against
the farmers. You've got to teach it that way,
because obviously you want to tell the kids

The New Class

that people have interests, and they affect their
behavior. The third way is debunking. The

_ way we used to teach debunking history was

_ perfectly OK. We'd say that Washington had

_ warts, Jefferson had a Black mistress, and it

_ was kind of interesting. You know what Amer-
_ ican history is now? A total despoliation of

man and environment. That’s all that’s taught.
We wrecked the Indians, we wrecked the

| plains, we killed the buffalo. The exploita-

tion of Indians, of women, of children, of

| Blacks. . .

My wife went down to two of the best high

_ schools in New York City about three years ago
_ and asked the kids to name two heroic acts in

American history, and they couldn’t do it.
How do you teach American History without
heroic acts? It’s full of heroic acts. I would ar-
gue that any culture that doesn’t teach you tra-
ditional history is in trouble.

One thing anthropologists did when they
first started studying cultures was they saw
that everything was relative. What they never
noticed was that in every culture there were
things that were not relative. Between coun-
tries everything’s relative. In this country you

can kill, in the other you can’t. But every cul-

ture has, within the culture, absolutes.

BROWN: You talk about the problem of the
relativity and what sounds to me like the de-
cline of the old values. And yet, one of the
bases for an absolute commitment is the sense
that resources are limited—that the world is a
place with some kind of global relationship
where people are part of a species or wider
community that was not sensed before by the
nation-states or the ethnic groups. So some of
the gaps in the relativity that’s obviously part
of modern technological society perhaps can be
closed by this sense that there are limits. The
limit is that you can wreck the place, you can
blow it up, despoil it.

KAHN: I think it’s stronger than that. My
own guess is that in the long run the issue of

_ protection of environment and ecology be-
| comes a religious issue, much as you suggest,

partly in order to perform the function you're
talking about, partly just to protect the envi-

ronment and ecology. In other words, calcula-
tions alone are not reliable. Superego is always
better in some sense than ego. I know more
about dieting than anybody you ever met, but
I don’t diet. Eating is an ego issue; dieting is a
superego issue. I believe, though all my reli-
gious friends tell me I am wrong, that nowhere
in the Old Testament or the New Testament

is there any ecological position except where
Noah saves the asps because they’re God’s
handiwork. Almost every other religion that I
know about gives a value to nature in its own
right. You have no right to destroy the tundra
unles you have to do it. The tundra was made
by God.

BRAND: Does Islam put any value on. . . ?

KAHN: Islam puts nothing. They are famous
for wrecking areas. All the peoples of the
Book.

BRAND: This sounds strange coming from
you, Herman.

KAHN: Remember, I’m going for religion
here for operational purposes, not because I
had a revelation. If you have a revelation you
don’t argue whether it’s efficient or not. If God
said, “Do it,’ don’t argue. But this is an oper-
ational issue, and I’ll argue, before you make
the stuff religious, you better know a lot more
of what you want to rule and what you don’t.
Pll make another bet, that any viable religion
of this sort is gonna have to have the concept
that there are areas which are, so to speak, in-
dustrial parks: do your worst. Because the idea
of protecting everything just isn’t viable... .

BROWN: You made the point that you don’t
choose the future, you make it, and I suppose
you meant you do things that then result in
other things which you don’t choose because
you can’t see them.

KAHN: You can choose decision points very
often, but you don’t know where they’re going
to go. Ecology uses this a lot, that you can
never change one thing at a time. That’s true
whatever you talk about.

LOVINS: Ken Boulding’s Law of Political
Irony is that whatever you do to help people
hurts them and vice versa.

BROWN: I don’t know whether these kinds

IOI

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

of questions even interest you, but how much
choice do you really think there is?

KAHN: I would ask the following question:
“What kind of people do you get?” If you act
as if there’s free will and people are responsible
for their acts, you get one kind of person. If
you act as if people and everything is deter-
mined, and they’re not responsible for their
acts, you get a very different kind of a person-
ality. And since there’s no question in my
mind what kind of people we want, we have to
treat people as if they are responsible for their
acts and hold them to it. And I don’t care what
the real world has to do with this, because even
if it’s a deterministic world you get a prefera-
ble kind of people by treating them as if they
have free will.

BROWN: What if you ask, “Could Kennedy
have kept out of Vietnam?”

KAHN: Without a question. He raised the
number of advisors to 14,000 for the most
trivial reasons. He passed around a memo say-
ing, even though we're sending these 14,000
advisors, this does not commit us. We passed
that memo around the institute and just
laughed about it. You ever tried to pull 14,000
people out of a disintegrating country? You
just can’t do it. He literally didn’t understand
that putting in 14,000 advisors was a commit-
ment much more solemn than a speech or a
theatyanahe:

BROWN: What do you think is the signifi-
cance of the political differences that are going
On in society?

KAHN: If you think of the New Left, pro-
test, hippie, drug culture, joy-love culture,
greening of America, small is beautiful, all
this, as attampts to reform American society,
the big scene you're getting next is a Counter-
Reformation, which started about ’68—'69, but
never had any leadership. Wallace tried to be
that leader but just couldn’t make it. Nixon
was not the leader. It’s the biggest movement
going on in America today. It’s partly a synthe-
Sis; it’s not completely a Counter-Reformation.

BROwN: All Counter-Reformations are a
synthesis.

KAHN: Exactly. So what else is new? And
it’s kind of interesting. For example, 2 out of 3

102

Americans like to identify themselves as con-
servatives today. But they’re antibusiness.
“Conservative” had the connotation all my life
of being probusiness.

BRAND: What do they mean by
conservative?

KAHN: Return to traditional values.

BRAND: Such as?

KAHN: Respect for your father. Virginity,
believe it or not. I don’t know how much
they're being hypocritical, by the way. But
they want first of all good behavior in public
places. They mean by good behavior: they
don’t want to see drugs or massage parlors
on the main street. They don’t mind if it’s
around the corner, you understand. For exam-
ple, let’s assume you have a small town, and
the chief of police confiscates a pornographic
film. I will guarantee that he’ll show it that
Friday night at the corner firehouse, and every
male adult will be there watching. I said adult
now, nobody under sixteen. And Ill make a
bet that sometime during the next week the
son of the chief of police steals the film and
shows it to the sixteen-year-olds. And his fa-
ther knows it.

There’s no objection to pornography in the
United States; there’s an extraordinary objec-
tion to public pornography. People think of
America as a Puritan country, but it’s not. I
used to use the following as an example, but
the recent revelations have made it less useful.
I would ask an audience, “How many of you
knew (I never said thought), knew that Jack
Kennedy was probably the biggest womanizer
of any American president that we know
about?” And about half of the audience would
raise their hands. The other half would look
and their jaws would drop—‘‘What are you
talking about?” And I said, “This was widely
advertised, widely reported on, and every
American who wanted to know about it knew
about it. But those who didn’t want to know
about it, it wasn’t forced on them.” You see, if
you chose not to know about it, you could live
in ignorance. That was terribly important in
the system.

BROWN: What do you think of the move-
ment to push out into the public mind so

The New Class

much of the inconsistency and personal behav-
ior that was formerly kept private?

KAHN: I think it’s just sick. It’s not a revival
of morality. The people who are pushing it are
on the whole New Class more than any other
group, and on the whole it’s their morality.
Take the issue of graft. At Hudson we've al-
ways made the distinction between graft and
corruption. Graft is a legitimate fee in certain
cultures which you pay to an official for doing
what he’s supposed to do. In those cultures
where they have this institution they always
have a word for it—compteur, dash, bak-
sheesh—and generally the word means, if
you go back to the language itself, tip.

Corruption is excessive fee. The guy’s get-
ting more than he’s entitled to, or he’s doing
something against public policy. Now we
don’t understand the distinction in the United
States. What happens? Take Vietnam. Before
we entered Vietnam, Vietnam was probably
about the most honest country, I would guess,
in that entire area. If you give a Vietnamese

| peasant ninety-five piasters and ask for a re-
| ceipt for 100, he’ll give it to you. You've got a

legal right to it, as far as he’s concerned. You
give him 90 piasters and ask for a receipt for
100, he won’t give it to you. They’re very
tough people. I mean, you're entitled to 5,
you re not entitled to 10, that’s his money. So
if you audit, you keep it down to graft. We
didn’t understand the distinction. We said
these assholes are just going to cheat us any-
way. That’s just not true. RMK was a big con-
struction outfit with Vietnamese paymasters.
They audited and RMK had no trouble with

_ corruption. That was the only place in the
| Vietnamese theater that was audited. Every
| place else we poured in the billions of dollars

without audit. We corrupted a society just by
our own dumbness. I went down to the Em-
bassy once when they were trying to put ina
tax system in Vietnam. We have objective tax-

| ing in the United States, you know, where you
_ report your own income. I said, ‘“There’s not a

Latin country in the world that has an objec-

| tive tax system—France doesn’t have it, Italy
_ doesn’t have it, Spain doesn’t have it, Portugal
_ doesn’t have it, Brazil doesn’t have it.”

LOVINS: It doesn’t work in England either.

KAHN: It used to work in England. Inflation
killed it. England is our example of the place
that was corrupted by inflation. . . . The
biggest problem in the United States is the
enormous alienation which the average voter
and citizen feels towards the system. I’m sure
you ve seen the poll data. If you asked in ’66,
“How do you feel about the leadership of big
business, about the leadership of Congress,
about the leadership in the White House,
about the leadership in your church,” about
something like half to two-thirds would
vote, ‘Approve very highly.” That number is
like ten to twenty percent today. It’s gone
down pretty steadily in the ten-year period.
The attitude is a little funny when you look
closer at it. “We think you have to have big
business, but we don’t like big businessmen.
We like a Congressional system of govern-
ment, but we don’t think the current Con-
gress is doing very well. We want to have a
Rresidentaem 113"

LOVINS: Aren't you saying there’s a general
loss of legitimacy?

KAHN: That’s the next step, when you start
challenging institutions. There’s a general ac-
ceptance of institutions, but not of the men
who run them. That’s the first step towards
illegitimacy.

LOVINS: I’m not sure about that at all. I
think, for example, that the legitimacy of the
industrial ethic is up for review right now.

KAHN: That’s almost completely New Class
now. There was a short period of time at the
end of the Vietnamese war when the protest
and reformation drew in a lot of people. You
know what drew them in, by the way? The two
things which forced the Americans to active re-
jection of the Vietnam War were the Calley
case. . . (where he was actually wrong, in my
judgment. It’s one of the few cases where I dis-
agree with the average American, who thought
Calley was mistreated, which is absolutely in-
sane). . . and the drugs. You just can’t draft
people and send them to a drug environment.
That’s not tolerable.

But as for the general disapproval of the way
things are being run, I'll make a bet that two

103

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

or three years from now you'll find those polls
reversed. I believe that that negative vote rep-
resents a genuinely reasonable scoring of per-
formance. It is healthy. In other words, they
looked at business, and business performed
badly. The government officials performed
badly and they recognized it.

ELIZABETH COLEMAN: Why is it going to
turn around in three years?

KAHN: Because I don’t think you'll have the
same bad performance. I think ’65 to’75 was a
very special period in United States history—
very special—and any attempt to extrapolate
that decade into the future is going to be very
misleading.

LOVINS: Why do you think that?

KAHN: First and foremost, you had this
enormous surge to control of a group which
had never before had control of anything. You
remember the term “book learning” we used to
use? Now that term can’t be used in America
any more.

BROWN: There are more people who never
run anything because more people spend more
of their time going to school. Apprentices
learn their job in a junior college, not so much
on the job anymore.

KAHN: And it doesn’t work. I recently
talked to Sid Warburg of the Rockefeller Foun-
dation, and he said, “Take agriculture schools
today. When I went to agriculture school, two-
thirds of the faculty had been born and raised
on highly productive farms, and they knew
what they were talking about. It’s just not true
today in the United States, and it’s completely
untrue in foreign countries. Both sides just
read books.” So what happens, they take 100 of
the top experts, put them through the training
course at Erie, the rice farm, and none of them
are able to get more than like thirty percent on
the exam. Any farmer would have got a hun-
dred percent on the exam.

BROWN: You're saying that the skills that
are being imparted are not relevant to the task.
KAHN: Yeah. Let me just give you a quick
example of this, how both Schlesinger and So-

rensen don’t understand how the presidency
operates. You remember these are the experts,
the historian and the President’s assistant?

104

BROWN: They wrote the two big books.

KAHN: They wrote the two big books. And
both books have the following scene. They’re
talking about the Cuban invasion, Bay of Pigs
problem. The National Security Council sits
around a center table. In this case you also had
Senator Fulbright there. Normally he wouldn’t
be there, of course. There are five people sit-
ting at the table. Then there’s a lot of people
sitting in the back, including General Twin-
ing, the Chief of Staff. President Kennedy
looked around and said, “Are we agreed?” And
nobody raised a voice, so he said they were
agreed, and Sorensen said they were agreed.

They hadn’t agreed at all. Nate Twining was
waiting to be asked, “Nate, how do you feel
about this?” and he would have told him how
he felt about it. He had a whole dossier there.
But he’s not about to interrupt his boss, partic-
ularly with Senator Fulbright there. He’s had a
lifetime of training. They had no sense that
those guys in the back of the room are not part
of that meeting, and will not raise issues un-
less they’re asked. Later on, Nate said, “I never
agreed to that plan.” Sorensen and Schlesinger
said, “He was there in the room when the deci-
sion was made.” They don’t understand! And
my jaw drops.

LOVINS: The whole English civil service is a
classic case of educated incapacity in a sense.

In a deeper sense it isn’t. People are promoted
there by their ability to write precise minutes

and witty essays. It’s a verbal culture that runs
On paper.

KAHN: They all write incredibly well. It’s
indecent.

LOVINS: The result is that we have a civil
service that is almost entirely innumerate.
They can write white papers entirely out of
their heads, but they wouldn’t recognize a rate
and magnitude problem if it came up and bit
them. I then went across the channel to
France, which is run by very clever polytechni-
ciens, and I rapidly concluded, if you want a
mistaken policy to be executed with great effi-
ciency, get the French to do it. I then looked
back again on my side of the channel and said,
“Gee, maybe we're really better off.” But being
competent with numbers selects against you in

The New Class

England. You're considered too clever. Clever
in a derogatory sense.

KAHN: Too clever by half, is the British
phrase. Whenever I hear that phrase I want to
hit that guy.

LOVINS: It’s said to the guy who in a sense
breaks the feudal code by working with his
hands. My first day in Merton as a Fellow of
the College I had just moved into my room and
I couldn’t open one of the cupboards because
the handle had broken off, so I was rigging a
piece of parachute cord for it as a handle, and
one of the college servants passed by and saw
me doing this and was horrified. He said, “Oh,
sir, you mustn't do that.”’ And being American
and naive I had to have it explained why I
mustn't do that. It was because college ser-
vants might see me doing it, and I would lose
face, and so would they, and it would all be
very awkward.

KAHN: There are only three countries in the
world where an engineer will pick up a
shovel—Canada, the United States, and
China. In England the engineer is a serf. His
status is so low it’s unbelievable. Hence, where
the research is good, the application is worth-
less. They have no vote, no influence, you
know what I mean? They’re treated as servants.

LOVINS: Whereas on the Continent they
have high status. It’s a title—Engineer such-
and-such. It’s the old division of the theoreti-
cal and the manual again.

KAHN: I think it’s just aristocrats and ser-
vants. The engineers are lower-class people.
They’ re trade.

LOVINS: Like surgeons in England.

KAHN: That’s one of the reasons they make
really dumb decisions all the time. They just
don’t ask the guy who knows what’s going on.
He’s not invited to that meeting. Now they
have a basically correct position—the expert
should be on tap, not on top. That I agree
with. I think Americans make the opposite
mistake of putting engineering too high. We
give them too much status.

LOVINS: I think there’s very little under-
standing in our own scientific and engineering
community of the limited role of that kind of
expertise in public policy.

KAHN: But if I have to make one mistake or
the other, I prefer giving engineering too
much status.

LOVINS: I wouldn’t, I think it’s very
dangerous.

KAHN: | agree. Both mistakes are danger-
ous, and the question is which one do you want
to make?

LOVINS: I’d much rather subordinate “we
the experts’ to “we the people.”

KAHN: We the people, yes, but not we the
aristocratic, very intellectual, very witty, very
well-writing people. You see, in the old days
they did things.

LOVINS: I’m a Jeffersonian.

KAHN: Remember, these kids used to be
raised to be able to run things at age twelve,
the ones who went through the British school
system. They broke with their family at the
age of seven. They had the very tough public
school system—cold showers, beatings, all
that nonsense. I once made a speech in En-
gland where I said this system is great, you get
ninety percent men and ten percent homosexu-
als. And a guy there said, “You've got the fig-
ures right, but reversed, Mr. Kahn.” By the
way, in any tough society which raises the kids
toughly this way, you always have homosexual-
ity as an outlet for the kid who just can’t han-
dle it. Tolerated. The kids were trained to
lead. I don’t think that’s true any more.

BROWN: Certainly in this country there are a
lot more people waiting a lot longer to run
things. They’re spending more time in college.

KAHN: They never have responsibility.
We've created this adolescent period between
boyhood and manhood, which actually is an
American invention. The whole concept is now
worldwide, but we were the first. The adoles-
cent is peculiar—he hasn't got responsibility,
but he’s got rights. He hasn’t got duties but
he’s got privileges. He hasn’t got a job, but
he’s got aspirations. If you wanted to corrupt
somebody, you couldn’t do it any better. Ac-
cess to money, access to girls, but no marriage
and no child. It’s all privileges, rights, prereq-
uisites—no commitments. You used to have a
commitment: you’ve got to get through col-
lege, and you've got to do well. That's not true

105

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

anymore. We're very forgiving. If you wanted
to debauch society, that’s how you’d go about
its

BRAND: Once you're on that path, how do
you get off that path?

KAHN: Well, the kids themselves know it.
They go for Outward Bound and this sort of
thing. The Englishman went for the grand
tour, when it was dangerous. He went through
the Balkans. He went through survival train-
ing. Incidentally, one of the tricks here which
every culture which has tried to adapt to these
things has picked up is dangerous sports.
Skiing is terribly safe, unless you make a mis-
take, and you break a leg. Skin diving at 500
feet is terribly safe, unless you make a mistake.
These are unforgiving sports.

LOVINS: The extraordinary popularity of
rock climbing.

KAHN: Rock climbing, this kind of thing.
Perfectly safe if you don’t make a mistake. But
by God you're in touch with reality. There’s
no relative reality, it’s absolute. The guy who
thinks it’s relative breaks his neck, and we set-
tle that one.

BROWN: Don't you think there’s less of
these unforgiving situations that Americans
are put through?

KAHN: Take Eric, my son. He does rock
climbing, mountain climbing, skin diving,
but I don’t understand lethal fun. I like skin
diving: ten feet. I don’t want to depend on my
watch for my ascent. I just can’t risk my life for
fun. I’ve done all kinds of incredibly dangerous
things, but always for the job. It’s always been
my duty, as I saw it.

BRAND: What sorts of things?

KAHN: I’ve gone all over Vietnam, for exam-
ple, walked through VC villages talking to
people, I’ve gone through very rough terrain
where I don’t particularly like to go—the
mountains in Africa... .

BROWN: Do you think the risk level in this
country 1s going down, such that it’s affecting
our character?

KAHN: Oh, absolutely. If you want to raise
a leader, it’s got to be a little bit rough during
his life. He’s going to have disappointments,
he’s going to have tragedies, so on. Like the

106

English public school system. Remember Wel-
lington’s remark, ‘“Waterloo was won on the
playing fields of Eton.” It’s a perfectly correct
statement. Parents today would never be will-
ing to send their kids to that kind of a system.

BRAND: An enormous amount of the coun-
ter-culture, in that weird period of ’65 to’75,
was the kids finding their own risks.

KAHN: If you don’t have the work ethic, you
need something to replace it. There’s a dozen
things we can use to replace it. One thing is
the tradition of the gentleman. The gentleman
is a man with many many skills, in which he
has a very high level of capability, none of
which are useful. They’re done because they’re
there. Now, as soon as you tell me that they’re
not useful, my interest goes to zero. I’m not a
gentleman. I'll take risks as part of a job, and
that disciplines me.

BROWN: Today risk appears to be less tolera-
ble because of our effort to spread well-being
to as many people as possible.

KAHN: If human life is the most important
value, you’re not going to risk it just to im-
prove the guy’s performance later. Now I
would argue, you cannot raise a child well if
you protect them from all potential accidents.

BROWN: This is the idea that no one should
fail?

KAHN: That’s the final extreme. That’s the
end when you get to that. You’re in trouble
long before you get to that point.

BROWN: Is this related at all to this theory
of equality of outcomes?

KAHN: It’s more related to a sense that in-
justice is not tolerable. There has to be a sense
of justice in the sense of legitimacy, but not in
a sense that everybody gets what he has coming
to him, that everybody has a right to an equal
outcome.

BROWN: So among many people the ine-
qualities that obviously exist for a variety of
reasons are no longer legitimate.

KAHN: That’s basically correct.

BROWN: The problem is that if you say, “It
is correct,” then you countenance perhaps sys-
tematic exclusion from the system, or an insen-
sitivity that compassionate wise people ought
to try to alleviate.

The New Class

KAHN: You have to start with a basic as-
sumption that every system has its injustice,
its inequities, its tragedies. Every system. So
the issue is not are you going to eliminate in-
justice, inequity, tragedy, but where are you
going to place it? To put it in its worst form,
who do you want to be in the bottom twenty
percent? Obviously you don’t want to put
anybody there, right?

BROWN: Yeah, but in our society certain
people have a higher potentiality for being in
the bottom twenty percent, so people feel that
that systematic process should be altered.

KAHN: Not everybody feels that way. This is
a New Class idea. It’s a question of guilt. You
remember those New Class religions I men-
tioned earlier? They have one common charac-
teristic. They rely heavily on guilt to keep peo-
ple in order. I have a friend of mine, a Polish
banker. He went to see LeRoi Jones’ play
which gave a very graphic picture of the suffer-
ing of the Blacks. At the end of the play, my
friend went up to LeRoi and said, “What can
we do to atone?” I said, “Sit down, you weren't
here, you were in Poland.” He couldn’t under-
stand it. He felt personally guilty. Now, I'll ar-
gue that one of the sickest characteristics of
our society is the inability of the New Class
elite to control their feelings of guilt.

BROWN: They don’t go to confession every
day.

KAHN: That’s exactly right.

BROWN: Three Our Fathers, three Hail
Marys.

KAHN: Then it’s finished. Now you can go
out and sin again.

BROWN: No. Go out and sin no more, but if
you do, come back on Saturday.

KAHN: Crime is committed mostly by
young people. It’s committed mostly by up-
rooted people. It’s committed by people who
have lost their churches. This describes the
southern migrator to the north.

GRAY DAVIS: I’d like to go back to this busi-
ness of equality of opportunity versus equality
of result. When I grew up there was this no-
tion of contest, and what we were worried
about was that everyone was at the same start-
ing point.

BROWN: And the same rules.

KAHN: The key issue is, do you define the
same starting point in terms of a series of ob-
jective rules. Some guys can run 100 yards in
IO seconds, some may run in 20 seconds.
They're not starting with the same physical
equipment. They’re only running the same
track.

DAVIS: The only inequality that we brooked
was inequality of ability.

KAHN: That’s correct, but ability came out
of the instructional system, too, to some de-
gree. In our society a Scotch Presbyterian does
best in terms of upward mobility, jobs, and
so on. Why? Enormous interest in education.
The same with Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish.
OK. You didn’t choose your parents, you
didn’t choose this educational orientation, you
were born into it. If you come from one of
these families, you can do well in America be-
cause you can do well in college. Now, take the
Black in New York City. Most Black parents
want their kids to learn good working habits,
but they have an idea that teaching the good
work habits should be done by the school. The
school won’t teach work habits in New York,
for a number of reasons. In the rest of the cul-
ture people understand that work habits are
taught by the family. It’s just not fair. The fact
that it’s not fair is a heavy burden for the up-
per-middle-class elites.

BROWN: Because they have more informa-
tion about it.

KAHN: Naw, the information was always
there. I think the reason is that they have noth-
ing else to feel guilty about.

BROWN: You mean, as the extended family
breaks down and your immediate responsibili-
ties diminish, your more abstract responsibili-
ties increase.

KAHN: Take a kid raised in suburbia. He
sees no tragedy. Upper-class suburbia hides
tragedy. If you have a sickness in the family
you don’t talk about it. He sees a tremendously
nurturing system that cares about him, and it
really tries to do things for him. He’s spoiled.
We're not giving the kids any sense that there’s
nothing wrong with having to wait three years
for something, or five years. There’s nothing

107

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

wrong with never getting it. You're not sup-
posed to get everything that’s reasonable.

BROWN: Then, how does the parent who has
the means, with all the surplus income floating
around, where does he or she get the argument
that a child really can’t have something. You
have to have a principle.

KAHN: There is a principle. Half the time
you explain to the kid why you're doing it, be-
cause you’re a democratic family. And half the
time, it’s “Cause I said so.”’ Because you also
want to teach the kid respect for authority.

BROWN: You don’t hear that one too much
anymore.

KAHN: In my family you hear it.

LOVINS: Herman, what in your future
makes people happy? That’s what I still don’t
quite understand. Why will they try to do all
this?

KAHN: Because in fact they understand hap-
piness. That is, I don’t know any culture in the
world which ever taught, despite the Declara-
tion of Independence, that you got happiness
by the pursuit of happiness. No culture has
ever taught that before. This is the first, and
boy it’s a nutty idea.

LOVINS: But how do you do it?

KAHN: You get happiness as a by-product
of other activities that you should be doing—
being a good father, being a worker, being
a good member of the aristocracy—that is,
doing the things your family and class and na-
tion require of you, and doing them well.

BROWN: In other words “human potential”
wasn’t the goal. Has that ever cropped up in
any literature 100 years ago? I guess the
Greeks talked about it.

KAHN: Not the way we talk about it. You
know, they talk about a very disciplined. . .

BROWN: How about the Stoics? They were
telling you how to be happy.

KAHN: Stoics aren't human-potential, at all.
They’re very interesting. The Stoics in Greek
and Roman culture had a kind of notion that,
“We keep the system running, we don’t care
how other people act, we keep it running.”
They’re really uncritical people. Their basic
model was not the soldier doing his duty, but
the actor in a play. Whether the actor comes
off well or badly doesn’t depend on the actor’s

108

efforts—that’s the author’s privilege. The au-
thor writes the lines. But at least you can go
through the lines as well as you can. They were
democrats; they ran an empire. They were anti-
militaristic; they ran an army. They believed in
equality of man and ran a slave system. And
they ran the place. I don’t think there’s been a
period of history where people had better gov-
ernors except maybe some of the Chinese
periods.

BROWN: They had a great sense of nature.
Nature in the sense there were certain rules,
natural laws.

KAHN: Natural laws were very important to
them. There’s a right and a wrong way, and we
see to it that the system is run the right way.
They weren’t that small. They must have been
twenty percent of the population, and they
knew each other.

BRAND: Was there a school for Stoics? How
did you become a Stoic, get born one?

KAHN: You got born one; it ran in fami-
lies. We don’t care how other people act, our
family...

BROWN: Christians were very much influ-
enced by them.

KAHN: They were very influential. I stylize
myself as a Stoic. My wife says, “You can’t bea
300-pound Stoic,” so I’m a Neo-Stoic.

LOVINS: Where in your taxonomy of values
are such traditional values as, say, thrift and
craftsmanship?

KAHN: They’re not particularly American
values, anymore. They were left back about
fifty-odd years ago. A lot of people still have
them, but they’re not.

LOVINS: I think they’re enjoying a
renaissance.

KAHN: No, they're coming back in the up-
per middle class, who don’t need thrift. Thrift
is a game now, not a serious activity. They go
to an enormous effort to save aluminum and tin
cans, things like that. It’s symbolic. They'll
buy a $3,000 tape recorder but use a bike. It’s
not thrift as I would use the term.

LOVINS: Craftsmanship?

KAHN: Craftsmanship is a great virtue but
Americans don’t have it. It used to bother the
Germans that we had a rifle with stamped
parts. The Germans said, ““You let a machine

The New Class

do it? A rifle is something that’s so important
to you.” We stamped it. Whenever there was a
clash between craftsmanship and efficiency,
craftsmanship lost.

LOVINS: Neighborliness?

KAHN: The poor are still neighborly. If
somebody’s evicted in a poor community, the
whole block will help them out. That’s much
less true in the middle class now.

BROWN: How do you explain inflation?
Doesn't your program require us to solve
inflation?

KAHN: Either solve it or correct for it.

LOVINS: Essentially to define it away by in-
dexing it. You can’t direct it without knowing
what causes it. I don’t think any economist in
the world can claim to understand inflation in
industrial economies. Stagflation isn’t sup-
posed to exist.

KAHN: That’s not true. It was predicted by
Friedman and other economists.

LOVINS: If they’re so damn smart, why do
we still have it?

KAHN: Because they weren’t listened to,
among other things.

BROWN: How do we get rid of it in this
country? Give me a three-point plan. Without
raising unemployment.

KAHN: Two years ago people like myself
were going around saying, ‘You'll probably
have about five percent inflation, about six per-
cent growth. We got that, by the way, from
the House Economic Advisor’s report. A gov-
ernment document, it cost $3.50. It predicts
events almost perfectly. When that report
came out, people laughed at it hilariously.

LOVINS: Prediction isn’t the same as
understanding.

KAHN: That’s quite right. You have two
kinds of prediction problems. One is to pre-
dict the effects of current measures. The other
is to understand what happened originally.
Now, what happened originally was reasonably
complicated. The main point about inflation
Pll argue, and we understand it perfectly well,
is first and foremost it is a monetary phenome-
non. If you don’t create more money, you don’t
get inflation. Now, that prescription is almost
worthless, because if you don’t create more
money, you'll have a big deflation, recession,

unemployment, bankruptcies, and all the un-
pleasant things that come with that. So you
have to ask yourself two questions. Why do
you feel it’s impossible to print more money?
And second, can you control it?

BROWN: People want things done. We’ve
got people in mental hospitals that need care.
We have child care because women want to
work. Why do they want to work? Because
they need this $20,000 you're talking about,
or they don’t want to live with their husbands.
We got to have new standards of safety, health,
roads, energy investment because of these
other things you talk about, so you got to do
it. If you do it, you got to raise the taxes. If
you raise the taxes, you lower the consump-
tion, and the television tells you you got to
buy more. So you print money or you raise it.
But there’s no big mandate to raise taxes.
There are very few people who are saying,
“Sock it to us.”

KAHN: If you say that the government and
the people are irresponsible, and that’s why we
have inflation, I'll agree. And I think they’ll
learn by experience, as the Germans did, and
have the lowest inflation around. One of the
problems in the last recession is we didn’t learn
enough from it. It was not a painful experi-
ence. Almost nobody went bankrupt, liquidity
was not dried up. People said all the time it
was the worst since 1929. That’s accurate.
That’s like saying a little fire in San Francisco
is the worst since the great fire in 1906. It’s
just not comparable. You know, one of the
things which the founding fathers understood
very well was that democracy is one of the
hardest forms of government to operate, be-
cause it tends to get irresponsible.

LOVINS: Jefferson says somewhere that the
system that he and his colleagues set up will
work fine in an essentially rural country.
“But,” he said, “if we all crowd into large cit-
ies as in Europe, we will become as corrupt as
they.”

KAHN: I think he’s about half right. Maybe
even more than half. Take New York City. You
cannot find a single county board of supervi-
sors which for twelve years pays short-term ex-
penses with long-term debts. You can’t find
one. Really, I’ve looked it up. For twelve years

109

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

New York City moved next year’s income into
this year and moved this year’s expenses into
next year. They did it openly and nobody
kicked. That bright city.

LOVINS: Governor, you're saying those ac-
tions were strongly motivated?

BROWN: I'm not saying anything, because
I like to ask questions. But I’m wondering
whether or not there are certain things going
on in society that are driven by forces that
aren't just malice. There are more people liv-
ing longer, who are not working, who need
more care, technology, and attention. And
there are certain kinds of poor people and dis-
abled people who are more visible because of
our social arrangements and due to the princi-
ples that are written down somewhere 200
years ago. When those principles are applied
to these new situations, they cost a lot more
money. And a lot of these folks don’t have it in
their pockets. So you have to come up with all
these devices to give it to them. Free educa-
tion, free transportation, food stamps, unlim-
ited jury trials and appeals five levels up, ha-
beas corpus, three courts . . . that’s all coming
from forces that I don’t know can be slowed.
Somebody might argue that it shouldn’t be
slowed.

KAHN: Let’s take three rich men. One of
them has twenty luxuries and can afford them,
no problem. The second has forty luxuries, and
he just breaks even, has trouble. The other one
has eighty luxuries and can’t afford them and
goes bankrupt. The guy who’s got twenty lux-
uries is going to make it, and the guy who’s
got eighty is going to go bankrupt. It’s a ques-
tion of degree. Now let me give you a second
example, which is really to the point. I have a
theory I call the poverty of affluence. Lots of
people come to the government and say, “We
want this, and this, and this’ —all the things
you were talking about. If there’s no money,
you just say no. Everybody understands it,
there’s no problem. This is what the munici-
palities have learned since New York. If you
haven't got the money, and you can’t borrow
it, you can’t spend it. An incredible concept.

The basic problem is the following one.
You're going from a situation where you can

11K@)

tell people, “We haven’t got the money, forget
it,” to a situation where you tell them, “We’ve
got the money for everything you've always
wanted, only we can’t do it all this year.” And
the people get angry. They’ll accept the state-
ment, “No to everybody.” They will not ac-
cept, “Wait in line.”

BROWN: That’s interesting. The trouble is
that you have a group in here which is very
sensitive to many of these problems. . .

KAHN: And they feel guilty if they spend it
on A and not on B. They can’t make choices of
this sort. They can’t give it to the Blacks be-
cause the Chicanos want it also. They can’t
give it to the Chicanos if the insane asylums
need it. Their only way of answering this issue
is to say “Everybody.”

BROWN: We've never had to make choices
like this before. It was all grow, expand. A lot
of these constituencies were not noticed, or
were not represented. There was not this alli-
ance between many of the new college gradu-
ates—Outreach, the public advocates, that
whole group which has allied itself with many
of the ills that haven’t been corrected.

KAHN: Now we have the money and we’ve
got to correct them, but we can’t do it all si-
multaneously. People have got to get in line.

BROWN: So you want patience and restraint.

KAHN: That is correct.

BROWN: In a democracy with high mobility
and high information flow.

KAHN: You ve always had it. The United
States in this case is one of the most responsi-
ble groups of people in the world. Look at the
labor unions. Remember the business that the
President should jawbone them? If Ford had
made a series of speeches one after the other
that labor shouldn’t get high raises because we
can’t afford it, you know what would happen?
Every labor union leader would be forced to get
as much as he can. He has to. In fact American
labor unions took almost no raises during this
two-year period. They restrained themselves.

BROWN: What are you saying, jawboning
creates higher demands?

KAHN: Absolutely. He has no right to sacri-
fice his union’s needs because the President sin-
gled him out.

The New Class

BROWN: So what does the President do in
this case?

KAHN: Shut up, which he did, and it
worked well—depend on the basic integrity
of these guys, and their basic good sense: By
the way, Ford knew what he was doing. I had
a conversation with him on that issue. He
understood it. “If I jawbone, these guys can’t
do it. If I leave them alone, they'll do it.” Ona
lot of these issues, there’s nothing that works
as well as frankness. One of the things that’s
impressed me about you in these issues, is you
have a tendency to say, “I’m sorry, we can do
one or two, we can’t do five; decide which two
you want.” That kind of a speech works. But
you have to be able to do that, choose between
the claimants.

BROWN: That’s never been made a very ex-
plicit process. Has there ever been a speech
made on the floor of Congress that it is now
important to reduce the purchasing power of
the working people of this country so that we
can increase the well-being of the social secu-
rity recipient, so we can transfer from one gen-
eration to another certain amounts of wealth?
Has anyone ever done that?

KAHN: We've done something even better
than that, but we’ve done that too. We
changed the budget process of Congress so that
if you increase A you've got to decrease B. For
the first time, and it’s working. I think that
the first person who gets up and makes the fol-
lowing speech, strongly, will look very good.
“If anybody gets increases greater than the av-
erage increase in productivity in the country,
then he’s got a higher share of the GNP and
somebody gets a lower share.”” That’s the num-
ber-one principle.

BROWN: The number-one principle of my
budgeting is for each program increase there
must be a corresponding program decrease.
But by what principle do you make these deci-
sions? You have to allocate the goods in the
public household. Before it used to be the mar-
ket, and everyone took it with good grace. The
market can cause bankruptcy, but government
can’t. You say life isn’t fair, but politicians
have to be.

HERMAN KAHN’S ‘‘NEW CLASS” IS A LABEL
OF CONVENIENCE

When I first read the ‘““New Class” talk by Her-
man Kahn in the Spring ’77 CQ, I was dis-
turbed by Kahn’s concept of the New Class but
I was unable to put my finger on exactly why.
In the month since, I’ve continued to think
about Kahn’s presentation and ask myself why
the New Class concept of which Kahn spoke
was so familiar somehow and yet so skewed.

Today while reviewing Kahn’s definition of
this supposedly new class it suddenly hit me.
The “New Class . . . earn their living by the
use of academic skills, language skills, esthetic
skills, analytical skills,” says Kahn. In other
words, Kahn is defining “Intellectuals.”

Going through the article I substituted the
word “Intellectuals” for “New Class” at each
opportunity. Almost without exception this
substitution worked, but with the curious re-
sult that suddenly Kahn’s amusing and clever
insights seemed somehow banal and foolish.

Even granting that the New Class in its
broadest sense includes a full variety of mental
workers (not just, strictly speaking, intellec-
tuals), we are still left with the question of
“why a new label for those who work with
their minds?” Kahn referred back to Milovan
Djilas as the originator of the category if not of
Kahn’s precise use of it. Clearly Kahn’s New
Class concept shares origins with the New
Left-popularized mid-6os theory of the “New
Working Class” which attempted to under-
stand the growing role of those with technical,
clerical and professional jobs in maintaining
American capitalism. But while that theory
was only partially successful in giving students
a perspective on their future post-graduate
roles, it was at least a straightforward attempt
to seek a better understanding of modern Cap-
italist class stratification.

Kahn’s intent is initially more mysterious
and yet becomes clearer if for ‘““New Class” we
substitute “Pointy-headed intellectuals who
can’t even park their bicycles straight,” or per-
haps, ‘““Effete snobs.” In his long-winded and
circular way Kahn is trying to isolate academ-
ics, intellectuals, professionals, etc., by defin-

Lane

Herman Kahn, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Amory Lovins

ing them as a class unto themselves, while
blurring other American class distinctions. He
employs other sleight-of-hand to (in his own
words) “confuse the discussion a little bit by
taking the neo-liberal part of the New Class
and using them for the whole. . .”’

What is this but self-indulgent nonsense

. . and pernicious nonsense at that? I'll
gladly grant that new perspectives can some-
times result from relabeling a group or phe-
nomenon and that mental workers can benefit
from learning how their shared assumptions
and experiences set them apart from others.
However, the upshot of Kahn’s relabeling
seems largely to be that the portion of the so-
called New Class which most consciously ser-
vices Corporate/Governmental policies is re-
luctantly labeled New Class and then swept
under the rug, while the “50%” which Kahn
calls “neo-liberal” are put on the line-up and
given the third degree. Looked at in a different
way, Kahn would be paid little heed if he
ranted against “Damned leftist intellectuals,”
so he invents a new label encompassing all in-
tellectuals, excuses the half who are on the
Right, and proceeds to deliver his critique.

This would be merely silly if it were an iso-
lated sermon, but it appears that this touting
of the ‘““New Class’ analysis has only just be-
gun and what is now a term used by a few neo-
conservatives may be picked up at large and
promulgated in all its ambiguity and
imprecision.

Kahn is delighted to define American poli-
tics in “‘a simplified fashion: a war of the New
Class versus the middle class. New Class versus
working class. When you look at politics that
way, everything falls into place.” At least
everything falls into the place which Kahn pre-
fers. Later in his talk Kahn coyly calls America
a “two-class society.” The hunters (the real
Americans) and the non-hunters (New Class).
No matter that he lumps the upper class and
the middle class together (hunters) in contrast
to the upper middle class (non-hunters); no
matter that earlier he called the New Class
“very hostile . . . especially to the upper mid-

LE2

dle class.”’ Let the contradictions and mushy
dual-definitions pile up. . . pay them no heed
as long as we see things as the New Class
against everyone else.

Five years ago we were treated to the coin-
ing of the “Silent Majority,” a convenient term
which made a virtue out of silence and allowed
an opportunist to speak for the mute. Now
we re presented with the ““New Class,” a malle-
able term which scolds the engaged and the
vocal.

I assume that in his and Bruce-Briggs’ forth-
coming book on the New Class many of the in-
consistencies present in his CQ talk will have
been dealt with. Clearly his session with the
Governor and staff was not meant to be gone
over with a fine-toothed comb.

But from all appearances the very heart and
intent of his New Class conceptualizing in-
volves a calculated misrepresentation of reality.
According to Kahn, “‘At the moment I don’t
think we have any serious big problems.”
None, it would seem, except those created by
the New Class.

I've great respect for Kahn’s cleverness,
charm and high-powered intellect, and in rais-
ing these objections I feel somewhat like a
nightlight challenging a laser. But too much of
his talk hit me as soft-sell demagoguery to let
it go by without a squawk.

Jay Kinney
San Francisco
{Summer 1977}

THEORY AND PRACTICE

A friend’s father argued insistently that noth-
ing could be folded in half more than eight
times. It was “theoretically impossible” and
had been proven so again and again down
through the ages. At home, it took me less
time than we spent arguing about it to fold
fifty feet of recording tape nine times.
I like the way high-powered thinkers can be
gently brought back down to earth.
M.A.W.D. Hoffman
Sturbridge, Massachusetts
{Winter 1979}

|
|
|
i

~ MALCOLM WELLS

Yellow Diamonds

Architect Malcolm Wells is a Wry
Fellow. You get the feeling, reading
his book about underground archi-
tecture (Underground Designs, 1977,

| self-published; $6 postpaid from Box
| 1149, Brewster, MA 02631) that he
_ went to all that trouble just so he

_ could be contrary—by, for instance,

constructing a quiet, sylvan building
next to a freeway. Beginning in
1976, Mac was the voice (in CQ, at
least) of ecological responsibility for

_ architects—plus a prolific postcard-
| writer to us lucky recipients in the
| CQ office. This batch of drawings is
reprinted from the Winter 1977 and

Spring 1978 issues. When he sent
them, he wrote that he was worried

_ that European-style traffic signs are

replacing “our big funny lovable yel-
low diamonds full of crazy imagery.

| What follows is a tribute to the great
| lemon-colored American gems.”

Art Kleiner

113

Malcolm Wells

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114

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Earl Butz
versus

Wendell Berry

When people grope for a way to de-
scribe Wendell Berry they frequently
wind up invoking Abraham Lin-
coln—tall, countrified, wise, laconic
(Berry: “I stand for what I stand
on.”), irrepressibly humorous,
grave—sometimes wrathful—with
moral concern, and blessed with
God’s own talent with words. This
lifelong citizen of Port Royal, Ken-
tucky, is restoring a piece of river-
side farmland by nurturing it while
it nurtures his family. Among his
crops are poetry (Farming: A Hand-
book, 1970; The Country of Marriage,
1973), essays (The Long-Legged House,
1969; The Gift of Good Land, 1981;
Standing by Words, 1984), and novels
(A Place on Earth, 1967; The Memory
of Old Jack, 1973). CQ has printed as
much of his stuff as we could. He
can debate like Lincoln too. Wanna
see my scars?

Steward Brand

116

From the original introduction

(Spring 1978):

Wendell Berry started this argument.
{His} book The Unsettling of America
(1977) ‘deals at length with the as-
sumptions and policies of former Sec-
retary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz,” as
Wendell put it in the preface. It’s an
eloquent book and a popular and in-
fluential one, without a kind word for
Butz ideas inite. | -

Dr. Butz, sixty-nine, was a highly
visible, forceful spokesman for agribu-
siness during his tenure as secretary of
agriculture from 1971 to 1976 and
was popular with his farmer constitu-
ency. When fired by President Ford
for the offense of having a fine vicious
joke overheard by press, he left office
gracefully and without apparent ran-
cor. At present he is Dean Emeritus of
Agriculture at his alma mater,
Purdue.

Ed McClanahan, an old friend of
Wendell’s and ours, put us wise to the
debate at Manchester College, North
Manchester, Indiana, on November
13, 1977. It seems that an English
teacher named Charles Boebel put to-
gether the occasion as part of the “Life
Schools Community Forum—The
Crisis in American Agriculture,”
sponsored by the Indiana Committee
for the Humanities. We’re grateful for
photographs to Debbie Lampert
Dupré at the Wabash Plain Dealer and
for photographs and additional tape to
Jeffrey Hooper of the Appalshop,
Whitesburg, Kentucky, who filmed
the event.

Stewart Brand

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

_BUTZ: I see we’re supposed to debate about
“The Crisis in American Agriculture.” I think
‘the word “‘crisis”’ is grossly overworked. I think
if we asked what the crisis was, we'd get all

| kinds of answers here and some people would
have a great deal of difficulty in even giving
their own concept of what the crisis is, if in-
deed there is a crisis. It’s a word that I refuse to
place very high in my vocabulary, because if
you look very hard on the other side of every
coin you call crisis, it’s opportunity.

_ So often I think we cry crisis when we

“want to resist change. We have a nostalgia

for what was—the good old days. Somebody
told me, the best thing about the good old

i days is a faulty memory. There were some good
things about them, to be sure, but I don’t es-
pecially like some of the other things when I
begin to remember in detail about the good
old days.

I want to make some comments about the
| positive side of American agriculture—some
of the reasons why American agriculture is

| not in crisis, some of the reasons why modern

| American agriculture is the very foundation of
ithe strength in America. I have read The Unset-
tling of America. There are a few paragraphs in
it with which I agree, not many. I don’t want
\to go back to the good old days. I don’t want
ito go back to the outdoors pump and you carry
water into the kitchen. I don’t want to go back
_to the old round wood stove we had up here in
Noble County forty miles up the road, where
\the fire went out at night and mother got up to
| build a fire the next morning and dad did once
in a while but not very often. I don’t want to

| go back to the oil lamp by which I studied un-
itil we got a Delco light system which seemed
like heaven itself—and by today’s standards
would be very obsolete.

| Idon’t want to go back to the lantern I car-
tied doing chores. I don’t want to go back to
the back-breaking toil of cleaning out the sta-
bles by hand on Saturdays. Dad always left the
_barn to clean until Saturdays ‘cause the boys
'were home from school. I don’t want to go
‘back to the hard toil we had and the long days.
I don’t want to go back to the fact that our en-
_tertainment on those long winter nights was
the Sears Roebuck wishbook that we looked at.

1

In the spring we got an order off—we were all
winter putting it together.

I don’t want to go back to the very short
cash days we had growing up back there. I
don’t want to go back to riding to high school
three years in a horse and buggy. The last year
Dad got a Model T Ford and we drove. I don’t
want to go back to the low level of cash income
we had on the farm, the high degree of self-
sufficiency where we made our own clothes in
the main, and made our own baseballs at
school by unraveling a sock and puttin’ carpet
warp in it to hold it together, until it got wet
and came to pieces. Well, I can go ahead and
name things I don’t want to go back to.

I only want to go forward. I want to live ina
changing society. That’s the kind we're living
in. I don’t want to live in a static society.

What about American agriculture and some
of the contributions it has made and is mak-
ing? I sat in Brezhnev’s office in Moscow a few
years ago and we were discussing agriculture
with remarkable frankness. He said, “‘Forty-
five percent of my people are on the land. And
I can’t put my people into the business of pro-
ducing consumer goods—TVs and radios and
automobiles and that kind of stuff—'till I can
learn somehow to feed my population with less
than forty-five percent of my people on the
land.” And I thought, “Yes sir, Mr. Brezhnev,
you are right now where my country was when
I was born.” (Sixty-eight years ago that was—
just to save you arithmetic.) We were an agrar-
ian nation—forty-five percent of us were on
farms. If we had known then how to make nice
automobiles and radios and TVs and bathtubs
and nice schoolhouses like this one here, if we
had known how to do that, we couldn’t have
spared the manpower to do it. We had to have
‘em out in the field with a pair of plow handles
in their hands. I can feel those lines around my
back right now, guiding the horses like that.

Today we not only feed 216 million Ameri-
cans much better than we did then, but we’ve
got 24 billion dollars worth in the last year to
send abroad—our number one source of for-
eign exchange. We’ve moved from forty-five
percent on the land to about four percent on
the land now. I know that causes some socio-
logical problems. Change always does. On the

I17

Dupré

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

other hand, all of us live better because of it—
including those remaining on the land.
They’re in the commercial stream now. They
too have electricity. They too have indoor
plumbing. I didn’t grow up with five rooms
and a bath up here in Noble County, I grew up
with four rooms and a path. How many of you
did? Can I see your hands? . . . For you young-
sters, it wasn’t all that bad. On those cold win-
ter mornings you learned to do things ina
hurry. You can’t find one in this county now,
except at the resort out at the lake and you
brag about it.

We've learned how to feed ourselves with
a little manpower and a shirttail full of re-
sources. Let’s never forget that. I’m talking
about modern, scientific, technological agri-
culture. It’s big business, to be sure. We are
still family farms. We talk about the corpora-
tion farm—less than one percent of our farms
in America are corporation farms, and nine out
of ten of them are incorporated for the purpose
of passing title from father to son without
breaking them up as they pass the tax collector.

What’s it all amounted to then for America?
It means that today we feed ourselves for a lit-
tle less than seventeen percent of our take-
home pay in America. That’s less than any
place else on the face of the Earth. It’s less than
any time previously in the history of America.
Now, I know food prices have gone up and I
know people talk about it. The other day I was

118

on one of these one-on-one TV shows, some-
where in Chicago I think. We had this smart-
aleck young reporter. He thought, “I'll get
Butz” right with his first question. His ques-
tion was, “When are food prices going to go
down?” And I said, “Well, food prices are
going to go down about the same time the cost
of advertising food on this station goes down.
They’re going to go down about the same time
they reduce your salary. When do you want to
start the cycle?” He said, “Well, since you put
it that way, let’s talk about something else.”

Now, he asked the right question. He asked
the question that every housewife listening
wanted to know. He just got the wrong answer
to it. The plain truth is we buy our food today
in America for a smaller share of our take-
home pay than ever before in the history of
America.

And we get all that built-in maid service
with it—the frozen TV-dinners that you
poked in the oven tonight before you came
down here. You take that ounce and a half of
meat in one of those TV dinners and multiply
it up to price per pound, it’s not for cheap. I
was out in Idaho a couple weeks ago, and they
took me to one of these potato-processing
plants. They said we now process at or near the
point of production two-thirds of the potatoes
we eat in America. You got to peel the potato
to make it go in the American kitchen any
more, it won’t go in unpeeled. And that’s not

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

Earl Butz

for cheap—somebody has to do that. I’ve heard
alot about the wonderful agriculture in China.
) I’ve heard a lot about the way that there isn’t
any hunger in China. Well, hunger’s relative.
But they’ve got eighty percent of their people
'on the land. When I hear some of these charac-
ters out here talk about we have to reverse the
flow and put people back on the land, I wonder
how far back you want to go. You want to go
back to where Russia is, with forty-five percent
‘on the land? You want to go back to where In-
‘dia is, with sixty percent? You want to go back
‘to where China is, with eighty percent? How
far back do you want to go anyway?
When I was a kid and there were forty per-

cent of us on farms in America we didn’t have
any schoolhouses like this. We had the little
one-room country schools—that’s the best we
could afford. If you taxed yourself then like
you do now the economy simply wouldn’t have
‘supported it, the surplus wasn’t there to pay
for it. Ninety-six percent of our families in
America have a TV set. And fifty-five percent
have two TV sets. The programs aren’t good

enough for one. Because we spend only seven-
‘teen percent of take-home pay for food is the
\reason that nearly ninety percent of our fami-
lies have an automobile. And forty-five percent
have two automobiles. If you’ve got a young-
‘ster in high school—three. We have an average

of two people per automobile in America. In
Russia, the super race, forty people per auto-
mobile. You don’t have to look very long for a
parking place there.
That’s why I refuse to accept the word crisis

here. We have our problems to be sure. There
are adjustments to be made, as is always the
case. We're losing people on farms—by defini-
tion—as the family farm gets bigger. There’s
only so many acres in Wabash County, and you
divide it among fewer operators. They’re still
family farms. At some point you reach an ir-
reducible minimum, but never forget that the
farmers in Wabash County are still family
farmers. I shook a good many of your hands
here tonight. I could tell which of you worked
for a living. The calluses were here.

The other day this circus train was speeding
across Illinois out here. They had this car with
a baboon in it. The car door flew open, the ba-
boon jumped out and hit a telegraph pole, and
it killed him dead right there. A few hours
later a couple farmers came along. They didn’t
recognize what it was. One of ’em said, I won-
der who this is? The other one said, Well I
don’t know but judgin’ from the location of
his calluses, he must be a government worker.

We support a lot of government workers,
because one worker on an American farm can
now feed and clothe himself and approximately
seventy other people. When I was a youngster
up there in Noble County, he could feed and
clothe himself and about nine other people. I
think it’s a remarkable story of success. Not
only do we feed our people in America better
than ever before and cheaper than ever before,
we got twenty-four billion dollars worth of
surplus products to send abroad. It’s our num-
ber-one source of foreign exchange. It’s the
way we paid for this Sony microphone. What
kind of recorder is that there—Panasonic?
Where was it made? Japan. Somebody got a
still camera? It may be American, but you look
at the parts—they came from Japan. We
didn’t pay for a single one of those things with
Japanese yen. We paid for em with Indiana-
produced corn and soybeans and wheat. And I
think it was a pretty good exchange myself.
We just make soybeans better than they do and
they make cameras better than we do.

Twenty-four billion dollars worth of that we
sold abroad last year. And when you subtract
what we paid for imported foodstuffs—half
the sugar we eat, and coffee and tea and ba-

119

Dupré

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

aa _.

Wendell Berry

nanas and that kind of stuff—we spent eleven
or twelve billion dollars for that. So we made a
net plus contribution last year in American ag-
riculture to our balance of payments of twelve
billion dollars. Believe me, that’s rather im-
portant in this year when our overall! balance of
payments is running about a negative twenty-
five billion. It’s a serious matter—the dollar’s
under attack in the international exchanges of
the world.

Well, that’s American agriculture. It’s in
change to be sure. I know that some of the ru-
ral institutions are under pressure. I know the
old country church is under pressure. The little
church I went to up there in Noble County just
forty-rod down the road, it’s torn down. It’s
not there any more. The little one-room school
I went to is now a hay-storage place for my sis-
ter and brother-in-law. But our challenge js
not to yield before the nostalgia of yesteryear.
Our challenge is not to turn the clock back.
Our challenge is not to go back to more ineffi-
cient ways. Our challenge is zot to put more
people back on the land and therefore decrease
the efficiency of American agriculture. Our
challenge is to adapt to the changing situation
in which we find ourselves. We need to evolve a
new community structure. I’m fully aware as
everybody else is that we’ve lost our old com-
munity identification around the rural school
and the rural church. And yet there is a cohe-
siveness in this group here tonight. There is a
cohesiveness in this North Manchester com-
munity, and our job is to develop that, to give
it strength, and give it meaning to move

120

ahead. I’ve often thought that if I live long
enough, that I’m going to adopt Butz’s Law of
Economics—it’s a very simple one: Adapt or
Die. It’s a harsh one. But those who cling to
the moldering past are the ones who die. They
truly are the ones to which the word crisis
would apply.

In my time I have seen so many improve-
ments in the overall level of living of America
and I’ve seen it tied right back to this efficient
agriculture, that has applied change, that has
applied technology, that’s using capital, that
has increased its efficiency, so that all America
lives better in any way you want to measure.
The people on welfare in this country live bet-
ter in terms of the things they have than the
top half of any population any place else on the
face of the Earth.

The overriding objective of all of us in this
world is peace. I’ve traveled the world a great
deal. I’ve been behind the Iron Curtain. I’ve
broken ranks in Moscow and Warsaw and
Hungary and Yugoslavia to talk with people on
the streets I wasn’t supposed to talk to. In their
hearts beats the urge for peace the same as in
ours. Perhaps more than ours, because they’ve
seen their countries destroyed. They’ve seen
their loved ones killed before their eyes. They
may want it on different terms than ours.

Iam convinced that in this tremendously
productive American agriculture we have the
building blocks on which the diplomats of the
world can build a structure of peace. And I
think that peace is something more enduring
than the absence of war. It’s a positive thing.

In India shortly after the Indians got their
independence from Great Britain, one day
Gandhi very sagely remarked, “Even God dare
not approach a hungry man except in the form
of bread.” I’ve seen starving men. No use talk-
ing to a man like that about human dignity.
No use talking about democracy. No use talk-
ing about freedom. He listens only to the man
who has a piece of bread.

And that is precisely the language we are
prepared to speak in the United States. To
speak loudly, to speak eloquently. We’re kind
of awkward with it, it’s a new role for us.
We're learning how to do it. But we have the

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

capacity to do it. And we have that capacity
because modern agriculture in this country is
what it is. It’s efficient. It’s progressive. It’s
productive. And it’s relatively free.

Thank you very much.

BERRY: My basic assumption in talking about
agriculture is that there’s more to it than just
agriculture. That you can’t disconnect one part
of a society from all the other parts and just
look at the results in that alone.

Let me give you an example of what I’m
talking about—a little parable that hundreds
of people are acting out all the time. This
country is full of people now who've been lib-
erated by modern agriculture from having to
do any of what Dr. Butz called back-breaking
work. And they look forward to a life of lei-
sure. They've got nothing to do with their
bodies except enjoy themselves. But when they
get started on this life of leisure they discover
that even to enjoy the many physical pleasures
that are now available to them they’ve got to
get in shape. So they go and take out a mem-
bership in a health spa and lift weights all day
so they will be in shape to enjoy themselves at
night. They’ve been liberated from meaningful
work in order to pay to do meaningless work in
order to keep healthy.

There’s bound to be some kind of a connec-
tion between the liberation, so-called, of mil-
lions of people in this country from so-called
back-breaking or menial work and the health
problem. I don’t know if you'd call it a health
Crisis Or not; crisis is not a favorite word of
mine either. But there is a health problem.
The last figures I read were that everybody in
the country now is paying five hundred dollars
a year medical expenses. That’s two thousand
dollars a year for a family of four. That’s too
much. It seems to me that it might be condu-
cive to health if people were doing more work.

And I don’t want to go backward. I don’t
think that there’s ever been a moment in his-
tory that’s had enough net good in it to lure
people back to try it again. I think what we all
want to try is the future. It’s just a question of
how we try and who gets to make the attempt.
Rather than talk very long and general, I'd like

to talk about the part of the country where I
come from and I hope that my feelings on agri-
culture and policy implications will be clear to
you from what I have to say about it.

I come from Henry County, Kentucky, not
too far from Indiana. It’s easy for us to come
over to Madison sometimes to shop. Henry
County is a place of fertile land but a very bro-
ken, rolling topography. It’s a topography that
makes the ground subject to erosion, especially
since it’s clay soil. Historically it’s been highly
productive agricultural country. It’s one of the
best tobacco counties in the state, but tobac-
co’s always been part of a fairly diversified
farming program, and so if you look back in
Kentucky history, you find Henry County way
up there among the livestock producing coun-
ties in the state. Traditionally Henry County
was farmed by small farmers. When I was a
boy there a two-hundred acre farm was a pretty
big farm. For the reasons of topography that I
have mentioned, it still needs to be farmed by
small farmers. It needs to be farmed by people
who know it very well, who care very much
about it, and who will stay at home and pay
attention to it.

What’s happening in Henry County is
what’s happening every place. The farms are
getting bigger, more mechanized, and the
farmers are disappearing at a great rate. Henry
County lies in what the real estate people call
the golden triangle—between the interstate
highways connecting Louisville, Kentucky,
and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lexington, Ken-
tucky. This is driving the land costs at home
way up, and the farmers aren’t able to buy.

People who're buying it are city people—
doctors and lawyers and businessmen of var-
ious kinds. They are able to pay the costs and
the high interest rates and they get as a reward
a place to come out to with their friends on the
weekends. They make some of the worst
neighbors that history has ever known. They
don’t know anything at all about a line fence.
They don’t know what their obligations are. I
had a neighbor like that who told me he didn’t
need to build his part of the line fence because
he didn’t have any cattle. One of them told his
neighbor that he was sure that he didn’t need

VAD

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

to build his part of the line fence because the
hillside was so steep that the cattle would never
go up where the fence was anyway. Well, I
could tell you a lot of fascinating illustrations
of the aptitude these people have for farming
and for being neighbors, but I won't.

This is the pattern of modern agriculture
where I live, and I think it’s repeated in many
places. The land has fallen into the hands of
first the farmers’ widows and then of these
moneyed people who aren’t farmers. The land
is then cash-rented to young farmers who’ve
made their investment not in land—which is
appreciating—but in machinery—which is de-
preciating. And they’re renting the land with
cash, breaking in whole farms at a time, plant-
ing them to corn and soybeans. They’re not us-
ing any animals. Not rotating back through
pasture—which probably ninety percent of
that land needs to be. They’re not sowing any
cover crops. They’re plowing up the waterways
and cutting the fences. Farm houses are going
down. They’ve driving in, producing the crop,
loading it, and driving out with it. In other
words, in their patches the industrialization of
farming is complete. They’re treating the farm
exactly as you would treat a factory or a mine.

This land is highly productive. And it will
be for a while. But already the stories are be-
ginning to circulate of land cleared with bull-
dozers, put in corn one year, and ruined. None
of this land is being better farmed now than
it was thirty years ago. In fact it’s being ne-
glected, abused, and wasted as never before.
I’ve told you the grain farming angle of it. An-
other angle is for somebody to go in on one of
those steep farms and capitalize it heavily with
silos, dairy barn, loafing shed, and so on, con-
tract a heavy debt on it, and then cover it up
with Holstein cows that require it to be grazed
far beyond its carrying capacity, and what isn’t
damaged that way they tramp into the hollers.

Henry County is a county of little farms
now gathered into ever-larger ones or turned
out to bushes. There isn’t any land in that
county that’s beneath notice. All of it’s poten-
tially good for cropland or for pasture or for
forest land. It’s probably never been so ne-
glected in its history. You’d have to ask, then,

122

where are the families that used to be on that
land? Well, some of them are in professions.
Some of them have done extremely well. Some
of them are no doubt very glad that they

don’t have to go back to farm those farms.
Some of them are working in factories in the
city. Some of them are on welfare—that is, in-
stead of supporting themselves on what we
now think of as negligible little farms, they are
being supported by us. In the shifting-down of
people among jobs, some people as a conse-
quence of abandonment of those farms are in
the ghettoes. My point is that wherever those
people are, they are not as independent now as
they were.

About a year ago a young neighbor of mine
came to see me. He wanted to talk about buy-
ing a farm. He’s the son of a tenant farmer who
just lately finally got well enough off to buy a
little farm for himself. This is a fine boy. I’d
had him come help me some. I’d known him
since he was a child. He’s as cleancut, fine,
honest a young man as you'll ever see, done a
lot of hard work in his young life. He’s mar-
ried now, got a baby. He was living in a house
trailer, growing as much crop every year as he
could manage and working in construction.
It’s a familiar pattern, I’m sure.

Well, he’d seen a vision. He’d seen a little
farm, a hilly farm, one of those marginal
farms, 100 or so acres. He wanted to live on it.
He wanted to buy it. He’s a carpenter, he’d fix
the house up. He and his family would have a
place there. It would be something under foot,
you see. It wouldn’t be the house trailer. It
wouldn’t be depreciating.

I knew what he’d seen. I’d seen it myself. I
know my forefathers have seen it. How it’d be
to have a place of your own and be indepen-
dent? You know how it is, you walk out, you
see a piece of land and you know very quickly
how you'd farm it, how it would look if you
had it, right? Well, this young fellow had seen
that vision. I think it’s a grand vision. And an
ennobling vision. And an indispensable one. I
said, “What does it cost?” “Sixty thousand
dollars.”

He began to hustle around and see about the
little money that he could lay down and what

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

help he could get from his daddy and what
help he could get then from the loan agencies
and banks. And he’d come and tell me and I’d
say, “Find out what the total cost will be after
interest.” He found that very hard to discover
but he finally did. It was twice the amount—a
hundred and twenty thousand dollars—and he
can’t do it.

Well, it was one of the hardest times I‘d ever
had. With myself. Because I thought from all
I knew about this boy that he belonged on a
farm—he wanted to be, he knew how to be—
and if I was right about his character, he
would’ve deserved to be. And you understand
that you have to deserve to be. You have to
prove that by being there and doing right
on it.

Well, it seems to me that we lost something
there. And I’m afraid we gained something.
I’m afraid we gained a disillusioned, thwarted
citizen who will not try quite so hard again
maybe. Now, there’re a lot of people like that
in this country, who would like to have a piece
of it. And we’ve chosen to keep them from
having it.

It’s not as though the biggest farm was the
most efficient farm. It’s beginning to be widely
circulated—the news is out—there’s a size be-
yond which size doesn’t get any more efficient,
and it’s possible for small farms to be highly ef-
ficient. It depends on how you rate efficiency.
If you’re talking about efficiency as the output
per man per day, maybe high mechanization is
the most efficient. If you’re talking about the

highest output per acre, the smaller operations
tend to become the most efficient.

I was driving through Indiana today. I
didn’t see very many corn fields that had been
sowed back to a winter grain crop. That means
that there’re going to be a lot of days in any
year when those fields won't be processing solar
energy into something that we can use. Sun-
light falling on those fields today was wasted.
If the farms were smaller, the crop could be
taken off and those fields sowed back. I know it
can be done this far north because I was on an
Amishman’s hillside in Holmes County, Ohio,
last year and saw where he’d harvested his corn
and shocked it, carried the shocks off the field,
and he had a good stand of winter grain. That’s
the kind of care I’m talking about.

The Amish are doing very well, on a small
scale. They’re highly productive. They’ve been
putting the money in the bank too, while a lot
of mainliners have been going out of business.

Somebody told me the other day that out of
every thousand dollars of government money
that goes to subsidize industry in this country,
five dollars goes for agriculture. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the free enterprise system to subsi-
dize railroads but not farms. For my money, I
would subsidize the farm. That’s where |
would place my tax money. I don’t mean in
give-away programs either. I mean in programs
where price supports would be coupled with
production control. Where the public outlay
would be for administration. I'd like to pro-
vide some low-interest loans for fellows like
my young neighbor. I don’t think that’s giving
him an undue advantage. Think of the thou-
sands of dollars we invest in the educations of
doctors. You can put a young man ona little
farm and educate him and realize a grand in-
crement from that investment.

As I see it, the farmer standing in his field is
not simply a component of a production ma-
chine. He stands where lots of cultural lines
cross. The traditional farmer, that is the farmer
who first fed himself off his farm and then fed
other people, who farmed with his family, who
passed the land on down to people who knew it
and had the best reasons to take care of it—
that farmer stood at the convergence of tradi-

123

Hooper

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

tional values, our values: independence, thrift,
stewardship, private property, political liber-
ties, family, marriage, parenthood, neighbor-
hood—values that decline as that farmer is re-
placed by a technologist whose only standard is
efficiency.

Our values have very clearly and markedly
declined as the urban industrial values have re-
placed the old agricultural ones. Private prop-
erty seems to me to be ina kind of crisis, be-
cause how can you expect people to defend the
principle if they don’t own any of the sub-
stance? What’s private property to somebody
who doesn’t have any property? Did we really
think that we were going to get people in the
cities, who own no land at all, to vote or fight
or whatever they’re gonna have to do to protect
our farms? I don’t know why they should, un-
less we can get clever enough propagandists to
brainwash them.

But these values are not native just to small
farms, they’re native to all small enterprises.
And again by policy we’ve wiped these out—
neighborhood grocers, little shoe shops. We
have to drive forty miles now to get our shoes
fixed. Maybe you're not supposed to get your
shoes fixed any more. Maybe you're supposed
to throw them away. I try to get mine fixed.

I think when the traditional people disap-
pear, the traditional values will disappear.
How could they survive? The lines of values
converge on the traditional small operator, the

124

small man of enterprise. They all diverge from
the profiteer. I’m assuming that when I say tra-
ditional values everybody knows what I’m
talking about—democracy, neighborliness,
kindness, and so on. If you’re going to be
neighborly you have to know your neighbor.
You can’t be neighborly in a convocation of
strangers. It’s what lots of people have been
telling us for a long time—you can’t have these
things in the abstract. I don’t think that you
can love those old values and love what has
come to be American agriculture at the same
time.

REBUTTALS

BUTZ: I’ve got a feeling that Dr. Berry and I
haven't met here tonight. Perhaps we won't.
Because we are spending five hundred dollars a
year in health insurance he says there is a crisis
in health. I’ve lived past my life-expectancy
when I was born by thirty years. My little
granddaughter, two years old, now can expect
that extra thirty years. I don’t call that much of
a crisis. When I was in high school up here at
Wawaka, we always expected to have a couple
of families out of school sick. You’d go out to
see where the kids were and you'd see the sign
on the door saying, “Quarantine—diphtheria
here,” or “Smallpox here.” You can’t find that
in this county now we’ve wiped it out. We eat
better. We’re healthier. We’re bigger. And of
course we spend money for hospital insurance,
because we’re affluent enough now to afford the
hospital. We didn’t even have a hospital when
I was a kid. I’ll take right now beside the old
days any day in this health business.

Let’s get back to this young boy who wanted
to farm, Wendell. I was interested. You were
citing a specific case. We stopped at Mc-
Donald’s out here a while ago. I was standing
there at the counter waiting and this young
fellow about in his early thirties recognized
me. I said, “You a farmer?” “I certainly am,”
he said. ‘““Where you farm?” “Oh, four—five
miles out of town here.”

We made some small talk, and I said,
“Dad’s farm?” “Nope.” I said, “Did Dad get
you started farming?” “Nope. I started on my

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

own.” I said, ‘““How much of it’s yours?” He
said, “I own four hundred acres.” I guess he
was farming about six hundred acres; he said
he had two or three landlords. Now that’s the
other story.

I see that taking place all over America all
the time. I know some doctors are buying
farms, and that’s quite all right. Some farmers’
kids are going into medicine, too. But the
great bulk of farm purchases is done by farmers
who are buying piece by piece, and the great
bulk of the landlords in this county are farmers
who've retired, or farmers’ widows. The per-
centage of absentee ownership of farm land in
Indiana is lower now than it has been for years
and years. That’s true in America too. Those
figures are beyond dispute.

I asked Dr. Berry this evening how big a
farm he had, and he said fifty acres. I said, “Do
you farm with horses?” He said, ““Yes.”’ But
you see, Dr. Berry can do that because he has a
substantial income as a poet, as a writer, as a
professor at the University of Kentucky. He
can afford to pay the electric bill—he doesn’t
have to have kerosene lights. He can afford to
have an automobile—he doesn’t have to drive
a horse and buggy. He can afford to do those
things because he takes outside income. Let’s
never forget that. That’s true of many writers
who write about such things as he does.

People say, “Butz, you're not for the family
farmer.” Of course I am. I’m for the family
farm to make a decent living for the farm fam-
ily. I don’t want that family to starve to death
slowly. I want that family to be able to enjoy
some of the amenities of life—a color TV set,
electric lights, indoor toilets. I want them to
be able to afford an automobile and a vacation
trip once in a while. Now, about saying that if
you don’t have a piece of farm land, you’re not
independent, you’re not democratic, you don’t
have an interest in America. . . . Don’t tell
me that the people who live in North Man-
chester, Indiana, and are home owners, who
work somewhere in a factory—don’t tell me
they don’t have a sense of independence. Don’t
tell me they don’t have a sense of community
involvement. Don’t tell me that they’re not re-

sponsible citizens, I think more surely than if
they were on a small piece of land which was so
small as to be uneconomic.

I know you make some trade-offs in this
world. You lose some of the old family entity
that used to be out there. This is unfortunate, I
think. But that’s not because you live on a farm
or don’t live on a farm. That’s because we’ve
got automobiles and TV sets and roller skating
rinks and that type of thing, and that’s just as
true of farm kids as it is of city kids. Those TV
waves don’t respect city limit signs a bit.

We talk about the crisis in culture, ‘“‘because
of no private property.” There’s a lot of private
property in this country. You don’t even have
to own a house to have private property. We've
all got life insurance. We’ve got interest in
America. We’ve got interest in the very profit
process in America.

So I say, when we get to dreaming about
yesteryear and the nice things we like to re-
member about yesteryear, let’s set it off against
the advantages of what we have. When you do
that, the comparison is so obvious that the
choice is easy.

BERRY: Well, since Mr. Butz referred to my
life, which is something I didn’t intend to do,
I may as well tell you about it. I know a little
bit more about it than Mr. Butz. Iam a school
teacher and a writer. I’ve written a lot of
books, which haven’t exactly sold like hot-

125

aqnd

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

cakes. I may have made a year’s salary out of it
by now—not a large year’s salary. I turned
away from the main line of a teaching career.

I was living in New York City, and I got a
chance to come home and teach in the Univer-
sity of Kentucky. And then I went all the way
home, to Henry County where my family,
seven generations of my family, have lived and
now live—not on the farm I live on, but on the
next farm.

I just had twelve acres for a while, most of it
steep, and I could hardly have called myself a
farmer then. But a developer bought the forty
acres next to me and was going to cover it up
with little cottages, without any plumbing or
sewage. He did some rather bad bulldozer
work on it and made a hideous mess of it and
failed. Then I bought him out, and I’ve spent
the last four years restoring that forty acres. It
has been expensive. The land could never have
paid for the operation. I paid for it out of my
salary. It’s productive land now—steep; by
modern standards, marginal. It’s producing
enough cattle now to pay the taxes, and we’re
taking our subsistence from it.

I should say that subsistence taken off that
little farm makes our domestic economy ex-
tremely sound. I’ve done the work with horses.
I’ve done it because I like horses, and because
driving horses, I’m independent of the oil
companies. I like that. Also, having horses
makes economic sense. A good broke team of
young mares now brings from two thousand to
ten thousand dollars without any trouble at all.
So I don’t want any of you all to worry about
me, because I farm with horses.

I was wondering how my neighbors were
thinking about it until one stopped—an old
man—and told me how proud he was of me,
and until another stopped just the other day, a
young man, and asked me if I could find him
a team. He said that he thought he’d cultivate
his crops with them and do—one—a better
job, and—two—a cheaper job than he could
with his tractor. He’s right on both counts.

I’ve done a lot of work. I’ve gotten a lot of
exercise. I’ve eaten well. I don’t feel that I’m
the least bit damaged; it hasn’t dulled my

126

mind. I was on a panel with the vice-president
of John Deere a while back, and he was con-
gratulating himself on the number of people
he’d liberated from groveling in the earth in
order to use their minds. Well, then I went to
New York, and I saw all those people up there,
vomiting in the gutters and passed out in the
subways and lying along the street, and I said,
“Uh-huh. This is what people do when they’re
liberated to use their minds.” I was delighted
to find that out.

Now, Mr. Butz has given you a lot of quan-
titative arguments. Let me just take a few of
them. We may never meet, because he’s argu-
ing from quantities and I’m arguing from val-
ues. Life expectancy is not a value in and of it-
self. Some things, our tradition tells us, are
worse than death—among them, too long a
life and bad circumstances. Quality of life has
to do with morals and with spiritual good
health. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with a
flush toilet.

One thing I do on my farm is use a compost-
ing outhouse. One of the most damaging
things we've got in this country is the flush
toilet. The nutrients of the earth that we eat
pass through our bodies, and according to the
laws of biology, if the land is to stay in good
health, those nutrients have to go back on it.
We use millions and millions of dollars worth
of soil nutrients that we eat and then put into
the rivers to become pollution, and then spend
millions of dollars purifying it again to drink
it. It doesn’t make any sense. If we ran our
own households on that kind of an economy,
people would think we were stupid. Suppose
you put a pump in your septic tank, ran the ef-
fluent through an expensive processing system,
and then drank it. You’d have people in white
coats at your front door. But this is the way
this whole society works.

Independence? If you’ve got your own land,
you're sure as hell independent if you grow
your food from it. You won't be starved by a
shortage of oil. The idea that human beings
could starve for want of oil is something new
under the sun all right. I won’t mind a bit
when we go backwards from that, just as an al-

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

coholic oughtn’t to mind if he goes backwards
from his addiction.

There’s a lot of private property, Mr. Butz
says, in insurance policies in America. Those
are abstract. I don’t love my insurance policy.
But I sure love my farm. I haven’t laid awake
at night thinking about my insurance policy.
Lord god, I hope I never do lie awake at night
thinking about it. I hope I never depend on it.

Mr. Butz has made two references to this
nice schoolhouse. This one here, has it got a
skylight in it? School takes place in the day-
time. Modern educators don’t know it.
They’ve never been out of their air-conditioned
solid-walled offices long enough to find out
that school still takes place mostly in the day-
time. You'd think that to save the taxpayers
money—everybody’s aching to save the taxpay-
ers money—that some of these people’d build
a school with a window or a skylight in it. It’s
same as with agriculture. We’ve based it on pe-
troleum. We've based it on industry. Mr. Butz
says, seventy people are being fed by one
farmer. One farmer plus how many truck driv-
ers, middle men, packagers, processors, pre-
cookers, road builders, oil companies, employ-
ees, how many? That’sasheer. . . It’s
misleading, is what it is.

I don’t ask that my values be adopted over-
night, and a bunch of people who've never
farmed move to the country. What I’m advo-

cating is a change of values, and I assume that
changes in behavior will follow changes in
values.

QUESTIONS

Question about the young man who inquired about
buying a team. (Questions were indistinct in the
tape, so they'll be paraphrased.)

BERRY: He’s not stupid, and he doesn’t have
six hundred acres. He raises some tobacco, and
even with the tractor, that’s very slow work,
cultivating tobacco. I don’t know if you’ve ever
used a two-horse riding cultivator. It’s the best
cultivating tool that was ever made, as far as |
know.

Question about the Amish.

BERRY: Well, they’re still doing very well
farming with horses. They’re doing well by co-
operating in neighborhoods, as a lot of people
used to. I don’t know how old you are, but
probably not old enough to remember when
people used to get together and work, but they
did. They still do in my part of the country.
There’s something to be said for the value of
people helping each other, don’t you think? I
don’t think that anybody’s going to get to
heaven by being efficient. I don’t think St. Pe-
ter, when he meets us up there, he’s going to
ask a single one of us how efficient we were. |
think he’s gonna ask us, did we help our
neighbors. And I think in our hearts that’s
what we ask ourselves. If we’re going to trade
the possibility of working with our neighbors
for a four-row cultivator, I think we’ve made a
bad trade. I like working with my neighbors.
We talk to each other. Most of the stuff I know
that I really enjoy knowing is from listening to
my neighbors talk when we work together.

VOICE: You can’t go backwards.

BERRY: I’m not talking about going back-
wards in history, I’m talking about going
backwards in character.

Question about a lot of new people getting into
farms.

BERRY: I don’t think it can happen very
quickly. One thing I’ve been fascinated with
recently is watching some of the city people
who come to the farm and are trying to learn

E27)

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

how to farm. It takes longer than I thought it
would. To look at this happen gives you some
sense of what a complex thing a farmer’s mind
is. I don’t think I appreciated it enough, al-
though I appreciated it a good deal. It'll take a
long time to get those people established and
well off. What would you say, you farmers? It
takes five years for a farmer to learn to use a
new farm, learn the condition of it and how to
get along on it. Never learn? I understand
what you mean.
Question about limits to the trend of fewer farmers.

BUTZ: Obviously there is an irreducible
minimum and we are approaching that. Right
now we ve got, by the census definition, 2.8
million farms in the United States. On over
half of those, however, the operator makes
more money off the farm than he does on the
farm—he’s a Wendell Berry. They’re really ru-
ral residents who have some of the things that
Dr. Berry’s talking about here tonight. Ap-
proximately six hundred thousand farms in the
United States produce better than eighty per-
cent of our commercial farm products. There
won't be much more reduction.

VOICE: If farmers are so important in the
world, why don’t more people listen to us?

BUTZ: It’s a good question. I know we’re in
some economic stress right now, depending
somewhat on the kind of farming you're in. In
Iowa the other day I asked this farmer, “‘How’s
your cash flow?” He said, “My cash flow is
pretty good, the trouble is I ain’t stopping
none of it.” Well, why don’t more people lis-
ten to you? J think in the current political
situation, it wasn’t farmers that elected Mr.
Carter. I’m sure he must have gotten up the
morning after the election, looked at the map
of the United States, and he saw everything
west of the Mississippi, plus Illinois, Indiana,
and Michigan, colored the wrong color. He
must have decided, “Nuts to those birds,
they’re not the guys who elected me. I'll take
care of labor with the higher minimum wages
and the cargo preference bill, I'll take care of
people for free foodstamps for everybody.” I
guess it’s just a matter of paying those that
took care of you.

BERRY: Id like to answer that question too.

128

I think they don’t listen to farmers because
there aren't enough of you. You're a negligible
quantity, politically. I don’t see how you're
going to protect yourselves without some
friends in the cities, and I don’t know how
you're going to get them. You see, this is the
split that I’m talking about. You're feeding
people who are not interested in raising food,
they’re interested in eating it. So when you've
got a declining small population in which no-
body is interested, I don’t see how you stop it
at an irreducible minimum. It seems to me
that farmers are in rapid precipitous decline,
they’re without political friends, and I don’t
see how they can do anything except expect to
decline some more. Unless values change.
Question about how we get more people on the land.

BERRY: | think that more people ought to
be able to buy it. I was interested in what Mr.
Butz said about the prevalence of farm buyers
on the market. It seems to me that when we
think about land prices and the income that’s
coming off the land, it’s not a very good situa-
tion. People are selling out of farming at a
great rate. It seems to me that the way the land
is priced and the way interest is going, it’s get-
ting more and more likely that non-farmers are
going to buy the land. And it doesn’t seem to
me to violate good sense in any way, or good
economics either, to take steps through tax
benefits to young beginning farmers and
through low-interest loans.

Question about how serious the consequences of the
current agricultural situation are.

BERRY: One thing I think you’ve got to have
your eye on is the young people. My farm isa
very negligible operation in Mr. Butz’s terms,
but one of the increments I’ve had from it is
that when my kids have been home I’ve had
something for them to do. They’ve been sur-
rounded by a complex structure that they had
to understand before they could work in it, and
working in it taught them something about
the complexity of it and the way it depended
on them. They have some kind of sense of re-
sponsibility. I don’t have a TV and so my kids
have been thrown back on books a little bit.

What my kids have had, I’m beginning to
see now that the oldest one’s getting away from

————

Earl Butz versus Wendell Berry

home. What they have—that I think is run-
ning pretty short in this country—is the ca-
pacity to entertain themselves. They don’t get
bored if somebody’s not putting on a show for
them.

A lot of kids now are getting credit cards
and charge accounts at stores. And you know
what they’re doing? They’re going to those
stores and stealing stuff, to amuse themselves.
In my classes, it’s getting harder and harder to
talk about traditional values now. It’s getting
awful hard to find a kid who’s ever run into the
Twenty-third Psalm. I asked my class the other
day, ‘““How many of you have read Tom Saw-
yer?” Not asoul. So, you've got color TV,
charge accounts, new cars, no work, and you’ve
lost Mark Twain. I think it’s a bad bargain.

HERE LIES A FRIEND OF THE FOREST

This is my idea for a movement that all ecol-
ogy-minded people can get behind.

You’ve heard of the saying, ‘““When I die
bury me face down so the world can kiss my
ass.’’ Well this works on the same principle.

Specify in your will that you wish to be bur-
ied without a casket in a prepicked place which

is devoid of trees and have an oak or other
long-lived tree planted in the Earth above your
body. Let it be known that this tree is in effect
your tombstone (maybe have a small plaque
embedded in it).

Since there is a law in this country protect-
ing graveyards and the like you have relative
assurance that there will be at least one tree in
the area that can’t be cut down by this subdivi-
sion-happy country.

It’s also unlikely to die because of the great
fertilizer it will be growing in (unless of course
you ve overloaded your body with chemicals
while alive).

If you could convince other people to do the
same you could start whole forests that could
never be touched by chain saws—what better
way to help renew the Earth?

We've been taking from the Earth and not
giving anything back but garbage for so long
we seem to have forgotten that only death be-
gets new life. Conventional graveyards don’t
do a thing to help the planet. Anybody got a
better idea?

J. Blair Moffett
Silver Spring, Maryland
{Summer 1982]

129

J. BALDWIN

I Was
Armand
Hammer

This originally appeared in the
Spring 1978 CQas a follow-up to an
article on job-sharing as an instru-
ment for social change. J.’s experi-
ence turned out much more memora-
ble than the original article. It’s
worth mentioning that CQ practiced
job-sharing for years—the editor-
ships and assistant editorships were
rotated beginning in 1982 between
me, Stephanie Mills, Jay Kinney,
Richard Nilsen, and Kevin Kelly.

A full introduction to J. Baldwin
would overwhelm this little gem of a
story. To learn more about J. see
page 263.

Art Kleiner

My college dishwashing job ended in a heart-
felt exchange of Fuck You’s one sultry evening
during rush hour. I had never much liked
Howard Johnson’s anyway, and reading Or-
well’s Down and Out In Paris and London hadn't
helped a bit. Ninety cents an hour! Who were

130

they kidding? True, you got to eat the un-
touched food that customers had left on their
plates (you wouldn’t believe the volume of
uneaten food) but now the boss wanted me to
take my Saturday morning to make a doghouse
for his Great Dane, and for ninety cents an
hour yet! To hell with it!

On the other hand, I’d have to find another
job soon or I'd be back before my Dad, con-
tritely accepting his “I told you so,” and his
“conditions” with his check. What middle-
class nineteen-year-old hasn’t had the problem
of parents insisting that as long as they pay
the bills, they have the say-so over your life?
Damn! And it was a recession year too. I
grumped down a malt at Red’s Rite Spot and
was in the process of completely bumming out
a table of friends when a grad student type mo-
tioned me outside. “I have a job for you,” he
said innocently. ‘Six bucks a day for two hours
work, but you have to keep your mouth shut.”
Wow. Thirty a week would not only pay my
expenses, it would buy gas too. (Regular was
twenty cents a gallon then.) In fact, if I was
careful, I’d be able to spend the summer on the
road instead of as a slave. So I said, “What do I
have to do?”

The play was this. There had recently been a
scandal at a famous Ivy League school where a
group of jokers had put an imaginary man
through college by paying his fees and taking
his exams for him. He had received a degree
with honors and a scholarship as well. The man
I was talking to was a part of a similar scheme,
only in this case the imaginary person was a
factory worker. At the time he was one of three
men sharing his shift. The three wanted a
fourth so as to have more time for homework
and also to avoid awkward face changes at

!
$
:

I Was Armand Hammer

J. Baldwin, CQ’s Soft Tech and Nomadics editor,
in 1954 when he was Armand Hammer by
night.

times other than coffee breaks. I had to buy in
to show commitment. A hundred bucks. I'd
get it back when I didn’t need the job any
more and had recruited a replacement.

The fabled worker was named Armand
Hammer, a reference to the baking soda box
symbol which to some had delicious Commu-
nist overtones in those days of McCarthy inves-
tigations. Armand worked the evening shift,
and my part would be the eight to ten p.m.
quarter. I reported early so as to be introduced
all around to the people who made it possible
for Armand to work unmolested.

The shop steward, line foreman, parking-lot
guard, and several others who knew too much
were paid off at Christmas with bottles of
Cutty Sark (that most acceptable of bribes).
Fellow workers were told that the ever-chang-
ing Armands were extras hired to fill in for ab-
sentees or men taken ill on the job. There was
some suspicion of funny business, but as long

as the shop steward was satisfied, nothing was
said. He should have been satisfied! Armand
was never late, absent, or troublesome, and he
always voted correctly in union elections.

When I became a quarter of Armand, he
was installing drive shafts in luxury sedans. It
was a job that required you to be quick so as
not to slow the line down and get fired. There
were four bolts that had to be started by hand
and then driven home with a shrieking air pis-
tol wrench. You had to be careful not to cross-
thread the bolts. It was all too easy to get se-
verely pinched or worse between the transmis-
sion and the heavy drive shaft that dropped on
a cable from the ceiling every fifteen seconds. It
was just dangerous enough to require all your
attention, and the idea of having to do that for
eight hours a day for weeks, months, and years
appalled me and still does. Two hours was
about right.

Armand had been working for about three
years when I joined him. He was accumulating
seniority and immunity to layoff. In fact, the
front office was considering him for promotion
as a result of his good record. Armand, of
course, refused, preferring to “stay with the
boys on the line.” Over the summer, Armand
was usually one man, the one who needed the
job most. At various times during the school
year, he might be one, two, or four men, de-
pending on school pressures. Three didn’t fit
the coffee breaks, and more than four was too
awkward. Needless to say, Armand paid his tax
on time. He told the company that he had his
own retirement plan and insurance so as to
avoid possible complications.

Last I heard from Armand was 1970. By
then he had made nearly $150,000 for about
120 men. I’ve often wondered about the men
involved, if they had any common trait other
than being a part of Armand. I'll bet a party at
which all the Armands showed up would be
pretty interesting. And I’ve speculated on how
many other Armands there might be in a na-
tion as large as ours. There just /as to be more
of them, existing yet not existing, passing un-
seen among us, like ghosts.

131

J. Baldwin

BURGER KING BOOGIE

Some of my favorite jobs have been in fast food
restaurants. That’s where my mind is free to
grow intellectually, while my hands labor.

If you like to travel, as I do, you can pick up
a job in one anywhere in the country—allow-
ing you to study the regional mores. It’s good
for the staff too. After all, it’s not every day
they find someone as interesting as you filling
the cole slaw!

Kentucky Fried Chicken “cooks” in ways
other than you might think. Here people of
all different ages rub elbows at menial tasks.
Being physically juxtaposed forces people to
face each other and eventually . . . talk. Mc-
Donald’s is a wonderful place to get a perspec-
tive of oneself in relation to other generations.
For example, I’ve found that initially, my pres-
ence bothers the many high-school students
who work there. It seems to upset them to be
slinging hash with a former school teacher.

tae

After all, the only reason they’re working there
is to get the tuition for college to become
professionals themselves. When confronted by
them I always have plenty of explaining to do.
In essence I confess that after a few years in aca-
demic life it’s “soul cleansing” to work at a
physical job. Not to mention the good exer-
cise. They end up liking me, which ts a lucky
thing because, believe me, it’s the Archies and
Veronicas who can make or break you in a job
like that.

Aside from the financial reward it’s a place
where a traveler, away from home, can find an
“on the spot” family.

There’s piped music for dancing in the
kitchen.

Also you can eat all you want and sneak a
chicken liver home for your cat!

Mia Elizabeth Kangas
Madison, Connecticut
{Summer 1981]

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First Week of
November,

O7O—
and More
Anne Herbert

| The greatest joy of editing a small
| magazine is discovering talent, and

Anne Herbert probably qualifies as

our finest find, certainly the one who

in turn did the most for us. The find-

| ing was easy. I judge poetry by how it
8 y. 1 Judge poetry

sticks in the mind like a burr witha

_ seed inside. From a preacher’s kid in
| Ohio came this kind of thing: “I
| would like to write a silence for all the

/ men I knew and didn’t know and

heard about and didn’t hear about
who came back from Vietnam and
died in single car accidents on
straight roads. A silence because I
still don’t know what to say.” “One
way to get out of going to Vietnam

_ was to have your father killed at Anzio

and not be born.” “An orchestra is de-

| ceptive. It doesn’t sound like elbows

and ties. Maybe an ecstatic furry di-

nosaur humming to itself or an over-
grown garden hooked up to an amp.”
“Ocean keeps on coming,” she
wrote. Well, so does her goddamn
writing, talking like the mind talks,
infesting and jollying us along with-
out our hardly noticing toward bet-
ter behavior. Some have said her style
and mine are similar. Nah. I use
commas. And I’m an editor who
sometimes writes. Anne’s a writer to
her marrow, who sometimes edits;
both skills, and her soul on her
sleeve, have carried COEVOLUTION a
long way. From all over our map, Is-
sue 20 in Winter 1978, Issue 28 in
Winter 1980, and Issue 35 in Fall
1982, Art Kleiner assembled this
sampling. For more, there’s Anne
Herbert on every righthand page in
the Next Whole Earth Catalog, and
there’s a whole book, her first, Sense-
less Beauty and Random Acts of Kind-
ness, newly out from Random House.
Stewart Brand

What are you getting in this collec-
tion? “First Week of November,
1978” is one of several stories Anne
Herbert has written about citizen
Amanda Madison of fictional Rising
Sun, Ohio. The title is the date it
was first published—Anne origi-
nated much of her writing in a self-
published journal, the Rising Sun
Neighborhood Newsletter, which she
distibuted mostly to friends. Stewart
got into the habit of printing ex-
cerpts in CQ—a popular move

Anne Herbert

among CQ readers. “The Day Martin
Luther King Was Killed” was a piece
Anne wrote before she joined CQ’s
staff in 1976, but it wasn’t pub-
lished until her own ‘“Neighbor-
hoods” guest-edited issue in Winter
1980. “Honest Hope” is one of a se-
ries of personal, somewhat politi-
cally-motivated essays that she still
occasionally publishes in CQ (in its
new form as the WHOLE EARTH
REVIEW).

Finally, if the North Point editors
will allow it (I’m sneaking it in at
the last moment) there is an essay
Anne wrote as a response to the 1978
Whole Earth Jamboree, a party
Stewart and CQ held to celebrate
Whole Earth’s ten-year anniversary.
At first I resisted reprinting the essay
because it’s so self-referential—you
have to know the Jamboree, and the
rest of that CQ issue, to fully under-
stand it. But eventually I realized
that it says things about community,
neighborhoods, gatherings, and
church that I, at least, have seen no-
where else . . . and it’s some of the
best writing Anne has ever done. I
couldn’t keep it from you. “Jonah,”
just preceding it, is a speech she gave
at the same Jamboree.

Art Kleiner

FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER, 1978

People are tired of explaining the Amanda
Madison Memorial Nonsense Box at Smitty’s
Bar to out-of-towners, and some people in
town don’t know the whole story. So I’m going
to explain it all because I knew her and I like to
explain things and everybody else who knew
her would rather write postcards than explain.
Amanda died in 1969 and was old and every-
one loved her. She started her unusual career by
not marrying, which was quite unusual at the
time. Some people like to tell Delta Dawn sto-
ries about that, but Amanda said, when I

134

asked her about it once, “I never had a beau
who surprised me once as much as I surprise
myself eight or nine times daily. I see no rea-
son to marry into boredom when the streets are
littered with it.” So she lived on almost no
money in her father’s house and did typical
small town things in weird ways. She taught
Sunday School, for example, and one time had
her eighth-graders read the story in Matthew
where Jesus curses the fig tree for no apparent
reason and it dies. She asked each member of
the class if they understood why Jesus did that
and if they thought it was nice. After they all
said no to both, she said, ““You don’t under-
stand Jesus and he wasn’t nice. Remember
that. Now let’s go play volleyball till it’s time
for church.” She took unexpected gifts to peo-
ple, like the time she took Lisa, who had been
a girls’ basketball star and then got laid up
with leukemia, a purple baseball cap with yel-
low foam wings sticking out on the side and
said, “I know you are tired of people looking at
you with mushy eyes like you really are a sick
person. Wear this and for one moment when
they walk in they will forget that you are a sick
person and remember you are a weirdo.”
Amanda did lots of other stuff, but the rele-
vant thing here is that she wrote notes. She at-
tended everything in town, and wrote alert
thank-you notes to participants. One time she
wrote Tommy Wills, “Dear Tommy, I know
it was difficult to keep a straight face in the
Christmas program when Amy was having
such unfortunate difficulties with her under-
gear, but I appreciate your making the effort.
Many others would have laughed out loud and
yet you said your lines exactly as you were sup-
posed to. This denotes a level of self-control
and consideration for others that will no doubt
be of use to you in many endeavors throughout
your life. Your Admirer, Amanda.” She always
wrote to the assistant of the person who got all
the glory, the last person on the cleanup com-
mittee to leave, and also wrote to people who
quit something or other, city council, the
Fourth of July parade committee, in disgust
with bad feelings all around and thanked them
for their past efforts.

First Week of November, 1978

But as time went on, she started writing
other things. People say she got crazy when she
got old, but I say she went from not caring
much about what people thought to not caring
at all. She started writing postcards to every-
one, to people she saw every day, that had
nothing to do with anything. Postcards of
Miami Beach written as if she were an antarctic
explorer—‘Took this in my gear to remind me
of warm weather. We’ll meet on the beach
soon, love. Progress is good, but we had to put
down a penguin rebellion last night. It was
rough but we’re safe now. Think of you always.
Norbert.” Once you stopped worrying about
senility, they were great, and people started
writing back. Especially the young men going
into the service who stopped by Amanda’s
house to say goodbye. She always said, “If you
don’t want to write me about what you're

| doing, write me about what you'd rather be

doing,” and they did. She got cards about pre-
paring and serving a gourmet dinner from An-
zio, about sitting in front of the fireplace
drinking a case of wine from Korea and about
planning and financing and building and using
the perfect teddy bear factory from Vietnam.
She and LuAnn Sellers, who was eight at the
time, carried on a long correspondence as if
they were both going around the world, one
west to east and one east to west. And even
though Amanda and LuAnn saw each other at

_ least once a week at church, they never talked
_ about it. Just kept writing. LuAnn was one of
| the most crushed people when we met at Smit-
_ty’s after Amanda’s funeral to get wasted. “I’m
_ only in Bengali,” she said, “I never got to tell
| her how much I liked her card about the organ

grinders’ convention in Kansas City, Kansas. I

| thought we’d talk about our trips when they

were over, but now we never can.” I said write
about the rest of your trip to me and that’s

_ when we all realized that Amanda could live

| forever in the mail. We could send her post-

| cards to people who hadn’t seen them and

| we could write to each other in the spirit of

_ Amanda—write about the dogshit in the back-
_ yard or the grocery prices on Mars and we do,

_ and we usually sign them Amanda or Rose or

Trailler, never with our own names. Rose and
Trailler were these friends of Amanda who had
the most incredible adventures around the
world as Missionaries for Not Just the Accep-
tance but the Love of the Law of Gravity and
we always thought she made them up until she
died and we found piles of letters from them in
her bureau. (“This little urchin took gravity
into her heart tonight, Amanda; I wish you’d
been here.’”) The nice thing about everyone us-
ing the same names is that you’re never totally
sure who sent you any given postcard. Amanda
may write you asking for advice about treating
her turtle’s acne and you may send your reply
as Rose to the wrong person who may reply to
you or to someone else. People around here
know each other’s handwriting pretty well, but
it does get interesting. Amanda liked things
interesting. I remember once we were halfway
through a bottle of wine and she said, “Life is
alternately boring and horrifying and we are all
quite unreasonably lonely and I see no reason
to treat dreams as some unmentionable head
disease like lice. We all have them and might
as well mail them to each other until we learn
to talk.” So that is why, Stranger, Smitty’s has
the largest selection of postcards you’ve ever
seen jumbled together in a box (people bring
back dozens from vacation) and why some of
them are used—those are Amanda’s that she
wrote herself, and we keep them moving, some
have twenty-five stamps and addresses layered
on by now.

This doesn’t, however, explain why the sign
over the bar says, “Invest in it!” That’s there
because whenever you'd ask Amanda if one of
her fantastic stories was true, she’d say, “‘Are
you planning to invest in it?’’ One time I was
fed up with her and I said, “What the hell do
you mean by that?” and she said, “Well, if you
thought it was true, you'd invest in it,
wouldn’t you? You’d make something else be
true because this was true. If you thought the
true thing was bad, you'd try to stop it and if
you thought it was good you'd try to spread it,
but why do you need to know if it’s true? If it
hits your heart close enough that you care if it’s
true, you should invest in it anyway.” So if you

135

Anne Herbert

like Amanda enough to care if she’s true, in-
vest in her. Send a dream postcard to a friend
and she’s true for you too.

This item written with the help of Andrea Sharp who
surprised me when I sent her a strange postcard signed
Amanda by sending back an even stranger one signed
Trailler and never saying a word about it.

JONAH

Hi. I'd like to share with you the story of
Jonah. Jonah is the guy who lives in the Bible,
about halfway between Elijah and Luke. A lot
of you probably think Jonah is the story of a
man and his whale. That’s not actually true.
Jonah is the story about the joy of hatred.
Jonah is the story about that exhilarating feel-
ing you get when you discover someone who is
really morally more reprehensible than you are.
Jonah discovered that joy, and Jonah’s basic
thing was hating Ninevites. Ninevites lived
far away from him, and he’d never met any of
them, but he had a lot of data about them.

Now, hating Ninevites was not like hating
Jews, Catholics, Black people, etc. Hating
Ninevites was like hating American Nazis,
builders of nuclear reactors, and tuna fisher-
men. It was a rational, well-researched hatred
based on the actual behavior of the hatees.
Jonah had a lot of data on Ninevites, and he
was building a career on them. He had just
had a story about the relationship of Ninev-
ites, the Mobil Oil Corporation, and saccharin
on the cover of Mother Jones. He was hitting the
junior college circuit with a speech about Ni-
nevites, and he was hoping to make the Ivy
League soon.

So he was not surprised when one day God
came to him to talk to him about the Nine-
vites. He had never spoken to God before, and
he wasn’t really a God groupie, but he figured
God knew who the expert was, right? So God
came to Jonah, and said, “Jonah, I’m going to
destroy all the Ninevites.” And Jonah said,
“Wow, you must have read my article.” And
God said, “Before I destroy them I want to
warn them. It seems only fair. Since you know
so much about them, I want you to go to Nine-
veh and tell them I’m going to destroy them,
so they'll have a chance to change their ways

136

and save themselves.” And Jonah said, “No
way in hell. I don’t want to go there, they’re
creepy people, and besides that, what if they
change?” So Jonah took off. He took the Grey-
hound bus to the most distant point available,
only it wasn’t a Greyhound bus at that point in
time, it was a boat. He got on the boat, and
thought he would skip town, and all would be
cool. He did not know he was dealing with a
Whole Earth God.

God followed him in the boat and started a
very large sea storm. The captain of the boat
was extremely upset about the sea storm. He
was an experienced captain who knew a theo-
logical sea storm when he saw it. So he said,
“Someone on this boat is not on speaking
terms with God. Let’s draw lots and see who.”
Jonah said, “Ah, we don’t need to do that, I’m
the one, I'll jump overboard because it seems
like the only way that I’m going to win.” Now
it turned out that God knew, as well as any
civil rights legislator knows, that the only way
to overcome hatred is with brute force. And
God doesn’t give up easy. So when Jonah
jumped over the side of the boat, God had a
whale there to catch him. Jonah landed in the
whale, stayed in the whale with the rotting fish
and the whale digestive juices for three days.
Jonah was a stubborn man of principle—it
took seventy-two hours of an unusual smell for
him to change his mind, but finally he said,
“Oh heck, God, I'll go to Nineveh.” So the
whale barfed him up on shore near Nineveh
and he headed for the world capital of badness.

Now, when he got to Nineveh, he was
pleased to see that everything that he’d ever
thought about Nineveh was true. I mean they
were right there on the streets using sweat
shop labor to run a nuclear reactor that pow-
ered an ITT plant that made neutron bombs,
whale trawlers, and saccharin. He was natu-
rally appalled. So he got into his street-beggar
mode, which he had once used to support his
Ninevite research, and he started saying things
in a way that not very many people would hear
them. He shuffled down the street, leaned
against the walls and muttered, “Repent. Re-
pent. In forty days you will be destroyed if you
don’t repent.” You had to be walking right by

- Larry Keenan, Jr.

The Whole Earth Jamboree

Anne Herbert

him to hear him but the very first person who
happened to walk by him happened to be
bored with his job as a nuclear reactor janitor
and he said, ‘““Wow, you're right, this is really
awful, let’s all repent.”

And that guy started yelling Jonah’s mes-
sage and it turned out that a lot of people were
bored with their jobs as neutron bombardiers
and saccharin cane cutters and they went to the
president of the country and said, “We've been
gross and awful, and we're going to repent and
you have to, too.” They put on sackcloth and
ashes, they turned their nuclear reactor into a
solar generator and they all planted organic
gardens and Jonah was pissed. He was just fu-
rious and he said, “OK, God, are you gonna be
conned by these hypocrites, do you think that
just because they’re behaving different they’re
better?” And God said, ‘“‘’Fraid so. Behavior
counts. You lose.”

So Jonah stomped to a hill outside of town
and sat under a tree praying for the Ninevites
to show their true nature and for God to fry
them alive. And all that happened was that
God destroyed the tree Jonah was sitting under
so he got a sunburn. Jonah said, “God, how
come you destroyed this tree? This tree never
did nothing.” He did a ten minute rap about
the tree and how trees are important and you

can’t just destroy them for no reason. And God
said, “How come, Jonah, how come, where-
fore why is it, that you care so much about that
tree, when you have no pity at all for Ninevah,
a city that has a whole lot of folks in it, and
some children and animals and you wanted me
to kill them all? How come you didn’t care
about them?” And that’s the end of the book
in the Bible. You’re left there with the ques-
tion. You never know what Jonah said. And
you find out the question is for you. What are
you going to do? Can you live without hatred?

THE WHOLE EARTH JAMBOREE WASN'T
WORTH IT ONCE

As anyone on the CQ staff couldn’t help know-
ing, I had a negative attitude about the whole
thing from the beginning, and lots of good
reasons. I don’t like events with large crowds
at them, I don’t like meeting people I don’t
know, I didn’t like trying to put an already
complicated issue together in the midst of a
bunch of people who were high on panic, I
didn’t like seeing Stewart change from the
well-organized small businessman I have
known to a sixties artifact who believed in lack
of planning as an article of faith (“‘Let’s not
ruin the spontaneity’). I didn’t like never
being able to place an outgoing call because all
the phone lines were busy all day, and I hated
more than I can tell you going toa 1% hour
meeting about the Jamboree two days before
the magazine was due at the printer. (I swore I
was going to tell Patty she had to go toa 1%
hour meeting about the magazine two days be-
fore the Jamboree, but it turned out that that
wasn't a good week for jokes.) And my reaction
to finding out at that meeting that everyone on
the staff was going to have to work 12 to 24
hours a day after having been led to believe
that they didn’t even necessarily have to at-
tend, moved me from anger to a fairly nasty
bitterness that lingered through the long hours
and multiple surprises of working at the Jam-
boree itself. So you can imagine my surprise at
finding out two months later that I now feel
negative about the Jamboree for a whole new
reason. I think it was such a good thing that
it’s almost criminal to only do it once. This

137

Anne Herbert

does not change the fact that if Stewart an-
nounced that he was going to do another Jam-
boree, I would immediately apply for a job
with Reader’s Digest. But I really believe that
the kind of good feeling that was present there
was designed to happen on some kind of con-
tinuing and regular basis.

The feeling at the Jamboree wasn’t a high
(that’s why some people found it a let down),
but was a very strong pleasant. It was in fact a
neighborhood feeling—a relaxation and ease
natural among a community that had tempo-
rarily become a neighborhood. A community
can believe in itself, but a neighborhood can
see itself—and what a relief to see with your
own eyes that a lot of people like you really do
exist, and here a bunch of them are, being nice
and not throwing trash on the ground. I was
surprised, and almost shocked, to find a neigh-
borhood I liked at the Jamboree since I’ve al-
ways thought CQ subscribers were purer and
more intense and more irritable than I. I
wasn't at all sure that I’d like to be around a
bunch of them for two days.

It turned out that the CQ people who write
to the office may often be more like unfun true
believers than my friends, but the people at the
Jamboree stunned me with their wonderful-
ness, and made me wish we could have hung
out together longer, or more frequently. The
volunteers, who were the people I spent most
of my time with, amazed me by being hard
working; cheerfully willing to do anything,
however boring; intelligent in the face of pres-
sure, disorganization and oddness; and they
had a nice funny low-key cynicism they used to
cover their generosity, just like all my sixties
leftover friends. In fact, a lot of them were po-
tential friends, and I only saw them once. That
seemed silly. Why bother to like someone
you re only seeing once?

And the volunteers weren't the only won-
derful ones. The whole crowd flabbergasted me
by dropping their trash into trash cans to an
extent that was nothing short of miraculous.
I’ve worked on a lot of cleanup committees,
and it was incredible to see at the end of each
day that there was nothing, repeat nothing, to
clean up. Intense searching by the cleanup vol-

138

unteers uncovered a few scraps of paper, but for
all practical purposes, there was, before the
cleanup, no way to tell that 8,000 people had
been there—or that anyone had been there.
This made me think that this neighborhood
had interesting potential for other, larger-scale
miracles, if it just stayed a neighborhood a
while longer.

Since I’m messy, I never wanted to under-
stand the saying about cleanliness being next
to godliness, but maybe it means that if you’ve
got the discipline for a minor goodness like
being clean, you could easily use that disci-
pline for major goodnesses. Eight thousand
people who could be that clean all at once
could do other things all at once, if they talked
about it enough, if instead of going to a pleas-
ant Jamboree once in ten years they went to
some kind of organic, alternative energy
equivalent of church once a week.

In fact, a lot of this amounts to saying that
I miss church. You non-church-goers should
know that Church As I Knew It, in the middle
of the road, was nothing like Elmer Gantry.
No one cried, and if you pushed people on
what they believed, a lot of them were more |
vague than dogmatic—something about God
existing, something about Jesus being special,
something about modified altruism being bet- |
ter than pure selfishness. A lot of what was |
happening was people with lots of non-reli-
gious values in common (political conserva-
tism, family life) getting together once a week |
to hang out. It was a nice place to hang out. If
you didn’t like grownups, you could volunteer
to hang out with children without having to |
actually have any. If you didn’t like big |
crowds, you could volunteer for the cleanup
Or preparation committee and hang out with
other people who didn’t like crowds and sort of
liked shit work in a way, like the volunteers at
the Jamboree. Also you could find out if you
wanted to be friends with people without
doing something artificial like going out to
lunch.

What my few friends and I all have in com-
mon is that we don’t have as many friends as
we would if we were born sooner because we've
renounced most institutions and are left with

Honest Hope

making friends at work or by inviting people
we've met casually out to lunch. I find that un-
ideal because it makes my stomach hurt and
because if you take someone to lunch you just
get each other’s stories, but if you set up fold-
ing chairs together, you find out what people
are really like and if you really like them.

Sixties leftovers have never really built a
lowkey institution to hang out together at, and
make friends at and casually bullshit about
what to do next at. I think that’s partly because
compulsory education crippled us. We were in
communities organized by grownups for so
long we never learned to organize our own.
What happened to the sixties a lot is that
everyone graduated from college and didn’t see
each other much. The clean grounds and lovely
volunteers at the Jamboree reminded me that
much of what people had in common then they
have in common now. If they met, casually,
regularly, they might have fun and carry it on,
whatever it was, in a whole new way.

I was surprised by how little the speakers
had to say that was new, and it made me think
that the newness would be found in the crowd,
if they talked to each other long enough, if
they lived in a neighborhood together instead
of meeting once at a one-time event.

What I think would be good would be some
regularly scheduled low-key place where peo-
ple could meet, maybe hear a hippie sermon
about how given our beliefs, we’re better than
everyone else, or about how given our beliefs,
we're totally hypocritical and aren’t doing shit
to live them out. (Those are the 2 kinds of ser-
mons, and we could use them both.) We could
sing a few songs, have a few potluck suppers
and accidentally possibly remake the revolu-
tion. I myself wouldn’t do anything to make
all this happen, but if it happened, I would set
up folding chairs, I would write the newsletter,
I would call up people to remind them to bring
food to the potluck.

I'd love to help with maintenance, but start-
ing things ain’t my style. For one thing, I
haven't got the intensity. In fact, lack of inten-
sity is probably the big reason nothing like this
will ever happen. To start something cold, you
need to get real intense and to get other people

intense, and if there’s one thing sixties left-
overs I know avoid like the plague, it’s inten-
sity. We've had intensity. (Or, as Andrea said
the other day, “I don’t want to talk about poli-
tics. I’ve talked about politics.”) Churches
achieved lowkeyness by being founded by fa-
natics who were followed by tired and low-key
children. Somehow, we’ve become our own
second generation and don’t want to feel our
own true belief of yesterday any more than the
children of converts want to get involved in
their parents’ enthusiasm. I don’t know how
we got worn down so fast. (Yes, I do, but I
don’t want to think about it enough to put it
into words.) But however it happened, we may
not be able to start any new processes, like a
weekly small-scale Jamboree, because we've al-
ready started as much as we're going to start.

Then again, maybe not. Articles coming
from different places for different reasons are
coincidentally, inadvertently making this issue
of CQ a neighborhood issue. The Jamboree
stuff is about that neighborhood, Joe Bacon
and I talk about our neighborhoods, Ray Jason
writes about neighborhood performing—all
about neighborhoods that are and were and
should be. So maybe sixties people are getting
interested in neighborhoods and maybe in
some strange and unpredictable way, we’ll
start building new ones to hang out in. We’ve
done stranger things.

HONEST HOPE

I’ve been thinking about honest hope.

When we start to hope often we promise
ourselves too much. If this one thing changes,
we say, then it will all change—injustice dis-
appear and no more lonely days, lonely nights,
for anyone, for me.

The war ends, we/they get the vote, waking
up each day stays too much the same, people
find new ways to steal joy from each other.

Give up, hide, lost dreams turn to head-
aches because we refuse to cry.

If we started with honest hope, could we go
farther do you think? What would honest hope
be like? What can we honestly hope for?

Time. The lie often has to do with too soon.
The hopeless (lazy) say, “‘It’ll never happen,’

139

Anne Herbert

and the hopeful say, ‘Yes, it will, and soon” —
turning to the angry “NOW!” Some of it does
happen now, some never, but mostly it hap-
pens some odd kind of not soon enough. Not
soon enough for the hoping workers to notice
that it happened. They’ve given up or want so
much more it doesn’t matter.

Percentages of a single lifetime may be too
short for honest hope to live in.

I don’t know, words keep trying to fit to-
gether, honesty, hope, seeds, garden, forest.
Who'd have guessed a seed would do that, get
so large? To be alive you have to have the quick
seeds, tomatoes to plant and eat, and corn.
Easy to remember, if you remember to remem-
ber, that it was you that started this good
thing happening not long ago. But also we
need to plant the forests, and tend them, and
leave space for them to tend themselves.

Assembly line time, we’re trapped in mak-
ing things fast that break fast and thinking
that something has happened. That magic mo-
ment, ablaze in television lights, praised in
jingle and slogan, when you stand in the store
and buy the new doohickus, when you believe
it’s going to make the difference, that moment
is short. Other moments, less famous, are
longer. Kachunk, kachunk, I can’t wait to
leave, where’s oblivion—moments of making
the shiny object go on a while, and there are
many of them.

Then there’s Christmas afternoon and it
breaks. Even if it doesn’t break, or not as soon
as Christmas afternoon, it doesn’t come close
to touching your store hope. It doesn’t change
things. That short hope breaks in the many
moments of the thing bored people made ag-
ing, but sometimes I don’t notice because I’m
on to other hopes, the next great purchase.

Tree time. Tree time takes longer. Trees,
when they grow up, you don’t think if you still
like them. Your opinion is not the point. Tree
time takes learning in a group of people like us
where the rhythm of life has been determined
(baba—boom, baba—boom) by tightening
ten lugs a minute and on to the next car. If
we're lucky we don’t work there, but we mea-
sure our luck by how many things we can buy
that were made there, and how fast we can buy
them.

140

Pea pod time could teach you tree time.
Fresh vegetables from the garden take longer
than “this factory turns out twenty-seven hun-
dred gadgies an hour” and are part of a species-
long love affair with your mouth, take a while
to happen and don’t let you down. It’s hard to
remember how good they taste and then they
wake up green pleasure cells you didn’t know
you had, the opposite of the third dent on the
car and watching the dust settle on the electric
knife sharpener.

Growing stuff with curves might match
time more than building stuff with angles.

Honest hope and true time.

Real, slow-growing, long-lasting, hard-
standing changes, like trees, never come up
and pat you on the head and say, “You did it,
kid, you made me possible, and you're terrific
and I’m grateful as hell.”

Because: 1) you might be dead by the time
they’re big and tall and you'll surely be differ-
ent than when first hope caught you; 2) some-
thing that substantial you weren't the only
variable that varied to make room for it; 3)
trees and big changes aren’t interested in per-
sonalities, even yours.

Honest hope. Plan to get your warm fuzzies
someplace else. (What are friends for?) Hope
that melts things and makes them new is as
huggable as a flame. But warm at the right
distance. The right uses of hope and the right
distance. Get too close to the campfire, you get
blisters, you get wounds. Stare at the flicker
too long, you get crazy. Warm your butt and
move it. Get to work.

THE DAY MARTIN LUTHER KING
WAS KILLED

The day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed,
John Evans decided to make a lot of money.
He had worked for Dr. King for ten years. He
got a real job, saved, invested against conven-
tional wisdom, and got rich. In two years and
three months, he had enough money. He quit.
He bought land on a state road in a southern
state, hired a sculptor, and built his monu-
ment to Martin Luther King. When he was
building it, he didn’t ask for help because he
knew it had to be done in a particular way.
Other people would discuss and compromise.

The Day Martin Luther King Was Killed

He told no one about it because he didn’t want
words and pictures to make it invisible to peo-
ple before they saw it. Since money can buy
more than people usually ask it to, the monu-
ment now exists in its own way and is some-
times seen. :

The place looks like a roadside park. Most

_ people pull off and use the pump and rest-
_ rooms and picnic tables and drive on. Some

take time to wander around. A few of the wan-
derers walk over the little hill in the back. Be-
hind the hill, they see fifteen life-size marble

_ people standing in a circle holding hands.

They aren’t on a base; they’re standing in the
grass. They’re wearing jeans and work shirts,
dresses, suits, and overalls. Their mouths are
slightly open. Small marble letters sitting on
the grass in the middle of the circle say We
Shall Overcome.

The circle is not unbroken. There’s a space

between two of the people. They have their
hands open and out at their sides, but no one is
holding them. Occasionally someone from the
road answers the invitation and comes forward
and takes the hands of the statues of John’s
lost friends. You look across the circle and see
Martin Luther King looking at you. The
sculptor did King well, especially the eyes.

When the monument was done, John knew
that it wasn’t in memory of King. It was in
memory of that one moment in ten years when
John had really believed in the dream, and of
all che moments when he had wanted to
believe.

John sometimes sits in a tree near the stat-
ues, hidden and waiting. He waits for one of
the visitors to see it, to see what it was like,
what he was like, to believe. It’s a very quiet
revival, but John hasn’t liked noise since he
heard the shot.

I4I

STEWART BRAND
With extensive quotes from
Bruce Ames

Human Harm
to Human DNA

Genetic Toxicity

Oh Art. Could you get that one? If I
get into it itll be a whole new article
and I can’t right now.

Stewart Brand

Oh Stewart. Well, suffice to say that
this is a major news story for individ-
ual people and the species as a whole.
It’s scandalous how little attention
it’s received in the more popular
press since CQ published this five
years ago. It’s horrible to think that
the deformed babies shown in this
article are genetic pioneers, but they
well may be.

Art Kleiner

From the original introduction

(Spring 1979):

Remarks in quotations whose source
is not cited are from a conversation
taped in January 1979, between
Bruce Ames, Paul Ehrlich, and Mar-
cus Feldman at Stanford University
(where I got my biology degree in

142

1960). I am grateful for assistance
from Ames’s colleague Lois Gold,
Susan Stern, and CQ staffers Patty
Phelan and Anne Herbert. The inac-
curacies and misinterpretations inev-
itable in a piece like this are my re-
sponsibility. The intent of the article
is to introduce the scope of a prob-
lem and equip the reader to do some-
thing about it.

Stewart Brand

As serious as ave radiation effects, it should be emphasized
that—barring nuclear war—induction of mutations by
other environmental agents probably is of greater impor-
tance. The list of potential chemical mutagens contained
in man’s diet and other ingested or inhaled substances is a
long one. It still increases steadily.

Curt Stern, Principles of Human Genetics, 1973”
Although much attention, both scientific and public, has
been given to the possibility of inherited defects from ioniz-
ing radiation, virtually none has been directed to the same
hazard from chemicals, which may be as great as from
radiation. It 1s now well known that certain chemicals
can produce both major chromosomal damage, likely to
yteld early defects in offspring, and point mutuations,
minor defects not detectable microscopically in chromo-
somes, but which, if present widely in the population, can
yield undesirable consequences in succeeding generations.

Committee on Science and
Public Policy, National Academy of Sciences,
Biology and the Future of Man, 1970 (Ref. 26, p. 870).

There is reason to fear that some chemicals may constitute
as important a risk as radiation, possibly a more serious
one. Although knowledge of chemical mutagenesis in man
is much less certain, a number of chemicals—some with
widespread use—are known to induce genetic damage in
some organisms. To consider only radiation hazards may
be to ignore the submerged part of the iceberg.

James F. Crow, “Chemical Risk to Future Generations,”

Scientist and Citizen, 1968°°

—

Human Harm to Human DNA

Comparing the routine running of the nuclear industry
(without bad disasters or accidents) versus the routine
running of the chemical industry and asking the question,
“Are you more worried about mutations and cancer from
nuclear or chemical?,” I would say chemical. . . . If the
local nuclear power plant has a meltdown, you would no-
tice it, but you could easily be melted down by chlorinated

hydrocarbons without knowing it’s going on.

Paul Ehrlich, conversation, 1979

It’s slow, deep poison. And there’s no antidote,

no cure. Only prevention.

BRUCE AMES*” Damage to DNA by environ-
mental mutagens ( both natural and manmade) is
likely to be a major cause of cancer” and genetic
birth defects, and may contribute to heart disease
and aging” as well. These ave the major diseases
now confronting our society: currently almost one-
fourth of us will develop cancer, and a few percent
of our children are born with birth defects that might
be attributable to DNA damage. Damage to the
DNA of our germ cells can result in genetic defects
that may show up in our children and in future gen-
erations. Somatic mutation in the DNA of the other
cells of the body could give rise to cancerous cells by
changing the normal cellular mechanisms, coded for
in the DNA, that control and prevent cell multipli-
cation. Mutagens are present among the natural
chemicals in our diet; among manmade chemicals to
which we are exposed (such as industrial chemicals,
pesticides, hair dyes, cosmetics, and drugs); and in
complex mixtures (such as cigarette smoke and con-
taminants in the air we breathe and the water we
drink). ...

Clearly, many more chemicals will be added to
the current list of human mutagens and carcino-
gens. It has been estimated that over 50,000
chemicals produced in significant quantities are
currently used in commerce and close to 1,000
new chemicals are introduced each year. Most
of these—from flame retardants in our children’s

| pajamas to pesticides accumulating in our body
| fat—were not tested for carcinogenicity or muta-
| genicity before their use.

* Italic quotes in this article are from Ames’ paper “Envi-
ronmental Chemicals Causing Cancer and Genetic Birth
Defects’ (December, 1978). In revised form it appeared
in Science in 1979. For detailed citation see Note 1.

These statements contain two premises
which are relatively new to science and owe a
great deal to Bruce Ames’ work at the Bio-
chemistry Department, University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. One premise is the consider-
able overlap of mutagenic with carcinogenic
materials—suggesting that a similar or iden-
tical disruption of the DNA code in the
chromosomes is responsible for mutations in-
herited through reproductive cells and for can-
cer which is spread through somatic (body)
cells. In other words, if you hear that some-
thing is a mutagen, it is probably also a carcin-
ogen. And vice versa. They both can be called
“genotoxic.” t

AMES: We have validated our tests for the detec-
tion of carcinogens as mutagens by examining over
300 chemicals reported as carcinogens or noncarcino-
gens in animal experiments. The results show that
almost all (90%: 158/176) of these chemical car-
cinogens are mutagenic in the Salmonella test. . .
We also examined the organic chemicals known or
suspected as human carcinogens and found that al-
most all (16/18) were mutagens in the test... .
Thus, almost all carcinogens tested are mutagens,
and the converse also appears to be true: mutagens are

7 Although it is not established that somatic mutations
are always involved in carcinogenesis, several lines of evi-
dence strongly point in such a direction:

1. Tumor induction implies a permanent and trans-
missible alteration of the cells.

2. Tumors have been shown to be of monoclonal ori-
gin—that is, originating from one single cell—which is
as expected for a mutational event.

3. Known carcinogens and mutagens share the same
electrophilic (electron-seeking) property.

4. Experimental evidence indicates that most, possibly
all, carcinogens are also mutagens.

5. An impairment of DNA-repair, as in certain human
genetic diseases like Xeroderma pigmentosum, ot in experi-
mental animal systems, leads to an increased incidence of
tumors.

6. Cell transformation by oncogenic viruses (i.e., those
tending to cause tumors) implies a change at the DNA
level.

The close correlation between mutagenicity and car-
cinogenicity has made it possible to deal with the carcin-
ogenic and mutagenic properties of chemicals in the same
context. In that spirit Druckrey has introduced the term
genotoxic to cover hereditary changes of germinal as well
as somatic cells, including tumor induction.’

—Claes Ramel, Ambio, No. 5—6, 1978”

143

Stewart Brand

carcinogens with few (if any) adequately docu-
mented exceptions. We found that almost all (95/
108) “‘noncarcinogens’’ tested were not mutagenic,
and those few that were may in fact be weak carcino-
gens that were not detected as such due to the statisti-
cal limitations of animal carcinogenicity tests.°

THE AMES TEST

The Ames test, also called the Sa/monella test,
is the other premise of the opening statements.
By its use large numbers of suspect chemicals
can be tested for genotoxicity quickly and in-
expensively—in two days for $250—$1,000
per test substance instead of the two years or
more and $250,000 required by animal tests
(using rats or mice usually). Since the Ames
test has made a revolution in the environmen-
tally critical domain of bioassaying, instigat-
ing a growing family of short-term tests, it’s
worth going into detail about how it works and
what it has done.

You take a petri dish, the standard microor-

ganism test tool, and lay in agar (gel for nu-
trient medium) and a “lawn” of a billion or so
of one of Ames’ special strains of the bacteria
Salmonella typhimurium. Very special strains—
they’ve been elegantly tailored: 1) to have a
mutation in a gene synthesizing the amino acid
histidine, so they can’t live in a histidine-free
petri dish unless they revert by mutation to the
histidine-synthesizing capability; 2) the muta-
tion involved is a “frameshift” in the DNA
which is not easily masked; 3) their DNA is
specially susceptible to the reversion; 4) the
cells are particularly permeable to outside sub-
stances; 5) their DNA-repair capabilities are

NORMAL CELLS
MUTATION

MUTATION

MUTATION

TRANSFORMATION TO CARCINOGE:
i NS

“ye PRECANCEROUS LESION
Cie ~~ :

SLOW GROWTH

Se)
@2% 6
METASTASIS es @
_ ee
i —_ gs yy
RAPID GROWTH AS 5 — |
MALIGNANT TUMOR OTHER SITES |

Figure 1. One theory of carcinogenesis states
that cells are restrained from becoming cancerous
by several independent genes and that tumors de-
velop only when mutations accumulate in all
those genes within a single line of cells. The mu-
tations (black dots within cell nuclei) are seldom
spontaneous but are apparently caused by carcin-
ogenic factors in the environment. Once a pre-
cancerous lesion has formed, it must in many
cases regress or grow very slowly; only a few le-
sions progress to an invasive, metastasizing tu-
mor. (After J. Cairns, 1975. See also Figure 4.)
From Ecoscience (ref. 23, p. 593).

Bruce Ames with a petri dish of bacteria and a
suspected mutagen—the Sa/monella test. Be-
cause of this test Ames is one of the 100 scien-
tists most cited in other scientists’ papers.

144

Ee nen

Human Harm to Human DNA

crippled and their enzymes for “locking in”

_ mutations are enhanced. Four different stains
are used to detect different types of mutagens.
The result is a test of great sensitivity and-high
resolution.

(Now you know why labs like Ames’ need to
work with recombinant DNA—it’s their basic

tool for this kind of detailed DNA design. De-
veloping the Ames test took ten years—1964-
74)

Also in the petri dish is a standard quantity
of homogenized rat liver, whose enzymes will
make the test more closely approximate what

happens in the mammal. Some chemicals that

would not directly mutate bacteria are metabo-
lized into mutagens/carcinogens in rats and us.
The liver puree gives the bacteria our
problems.

Drop a quarter-inch piece of filter paper
soaked in the substance you're testing into the
middle of the dish, keep it at body tempera-
ture for a day, and look: if there is a ring of
| bacteria colonies around the test substance,
it is mutagenic. A significant number of the
crippled Salmonella bacteria have mutated back
to histidine-synthesizing viability and have
_generated colonies big enough to see. (See fig-
ures 2 and 3.)

Using this test Ames and Arlene Blum de-
tected in 1977 the mutagenicity of Tris, the
fire retardant in sleepwear used by fifty million
American children and absorbed into their
bodies. A year and a half later Tris was re-
moved from the market when it was found to
cause cancer in animals. In 1975 Ames’ lab
found that 90% of the hydrogen peroxide hair
_dyes used by twenty-five million Americans,
_mostly women, were genotoxic and absorbed
through their scalps. The hair dyes are still on
the market.
_ Bad news—and there’s more to come—but
the bearer of the bad news is also itself the
good news.
Free of charge or patent, Ames’ lab has sent
their strains of Salmonella to over 2,000 gov-
ernment, industrial, and academic laboratories
_who wanted to conduct their own tests. Said
Ames recently, “Most of the industries in the
world are using it—because it saves them

Figure 2. The “spot test” for mutagen-induced
revertants. Each petri plate contains, in a thin
overlay of top agar, the tester strain TA98 of Sa/-
monella bacteria and, in the case of plates C and
D, a liver microsomal activation system (S-9
Mix). Mutagens were applied to 6-mm filter pa-
per disks, which were then placed in the center
of each plate. Mutagen-induced revertants ap-
pear as a circle of revertant colonies around each
disk.

A. Control plate: spontaneous revertants.

B. Plate showing revertant colonies produced by
the Japanese food additive furyl-furamide (AF-
2)—I microgram.

C. The mold carcinogen aflotoxin B, -1
microgram.

D, 2-aminoflorene—1o micrograms.

Reprinted, with permission, from B. N. Ames et
al.*’ Copyright © 1975 by Elsevier Scientific
Publishing Co., Amsterdam.

money. In developing a chemical they go
through hundreds of chemicals before they get
one they really like. This way they can be test-
ing them with our test and other short-term
tests, and if something is bad they can throw it
out and it doesn’t cost them much. But when
they finally develop a product, then it costs a
lot of money to run an animal cancer test and
they’re not overjoyed to find out it’s a carcino-
gen at the very end. So the companies have all

145

Stewart Brand

Smokey Ash Brown

Natural @\.
Black

Frivolous
Fawn

Figure 3. Spot tests on petri plates showing
the mutagenicity of various hair dyes on strain
TA1538: Moonhaze no. 32 (Miss Clairol),
Moonlit Mink no. 360 (Clairol Born Blonde),
Wild Fire no. 32 (Roux fancitone) (all tested
without peroxide), and Frivolous Fawn no. 23
(Roux fancitone) (mixed with H,O, as per in-
structions). Control plates without hair dyes are
on the right. Plates B, but not A, contain liver
microsomes (S-9 Mix). Smokey Ash Brown no.
775 and Natural Black no. 83 (Clairol Loving
Care) are semi-permanent, non-oxidative type
dyes. From Bruce Ames et al.°”

been enthusiastic about using these short-term
tests.”

Since they’re keeping genotoxic products
from ever reaching the market, we can share
their enthusiasm.

Also using the tests are regulatory agencies
and environmental investigators.

AMES: Lots of laboratories now are using the
short-term tests for looking at all kinds of compounds
in the environment, particularly complex mixtures.
Water pollutants or air pollutants are horribly com-
plex mixtures. You can use this for trying to figure
out what chemicals in there look dangerous and
where they've coming from. That’s something you
couldn’t do with a traditional animal cancer test.

The Ames test is not fool proof. It misses
10% of the potential carcinogens—some of
the chlorinated chemicals, pesticides, and
metals.” Fortunately the success of the Ames

146

test has inspired a whole generation of other
short-term tests which, taken together, can
provide an effective screen. Most laboratories
using the Ames test now include it as one of a
battery of short-term tests. Ames’ colleague
Joyce McCann reports there are at least eighty
such tests being developed—other tests with
microorganisms such as the Pol-A test working
with Escherichia coli; whole organism tests us-
ing Drosophila (fruit flies), small fish, etc.;
tests in cultured mammalian cells; and tumor-
forming tests with mammalian cells.“

The animal tests still have the final say, but
only 100 such tests a year are conducted by the
National Cancer Institute, and they take two
to three-and-a-half years. *

AMES: One limitation of animal cancer tests,
however, is their sensitivity. An environmental car-
cinogen causing cancer in 1% of 100 million people
would result in a million cases of cancer. To detect a
chemical causing cancer in only 1% of the test ani-
mals, we would have to use 10,000 rats or mice.

EPIDEMIOLOGY

In fact one of the major test animals in use is
humans, without their knowledge or consent.
It’s called epidemiology—what turns up in hu-
man medical histories.

AMES: A chemical mutagen (and carcinogen )—
the agricultural pesticide dibromochloropropane
(DBCP )—was recently discovered, somewhat by
accident, to cause infertility in many DBCP work-
ers who had been exposed to it. DBCP might also
cause a variety of genetic abnormalities among the
offspring of those workers who were able to produce
children. If the sterility had not been connected with
the occupational exposure, thus alerting us to the
dangers of DBCP, it seems doubtful that genetic
abnormalities and cancer that might occur years
later would be connected to the earlier exposure... .

DBCP was used until recently at a level of about
10 million pounds per year in the United States. In
1961 it was shown to cause sterility and testicular
atrophy in animals;°” in 1973 it was shown to be
a carcinogen,” and in 1977 it was shown to be a

* Because of the high cost, usually only fifty animals are
used, even in a thorough experiment. The sensitivity
problems are partially overcome (though not to complete
satisfaction) by using very high doses.

{

\

Human Harm to Human DNA

_ mutagen in Salmonella.” Its potency as a carcino-
gen 1s such that 2 mglkglday in male and in female
rats gives 50% of the animals cancer. (It is slightly

_ Less potent {8 mglkglday} in male and female mice.)

A2 mglkg daily level is approximately the exposure

level of a worker breathing air contaminated with 2

ppm of DBCP—close to the actual level of worker
exposure.

It 15 too early to see if many of the workers will
| get cancer in twenty years, but it 1s not too early to
see that a high percentage of them are now infertile.
Currently, almost 100 workers in several companies
have been made sterile or have low sperm counts as a
consequence of exposures to DBCP for as little as one
to two years. Because eighty industrial plants were
handling the material, many more workers will
probably be discovered to be affected by this chemical.
It is unclear how much DBCP was eaten by con-
_sumers as residues in food since there has usually
been no maximum level standard for residues.

One problem is that, other considerations
aside, humans are truly lousy test animals.
We're large, slow-reproducing, deceptive, ex-
_ posed to innumerable potential toxins, and we
don’t hold still in any sense. The ideal test or-
| ganism is uniform. In the noise of our im-
_mense variability, the signal of any particular
environmental cause of disease gets lost unless
it’s overwhelming. This is particularly true of
cancer, which takes twenty to thirty years to
develop after the carcinogenic exposure.

_ AMES: Even with the current level of sophistica-
tion of human epidemiology it 1s almost unheard of
to identify the causal agent when the increase in risk
15 below 50% for the type of cancer being examined,
_and even increases considerably above that are
difficult.

The best human cancer data by far comes
from cigarette smoking. A considerable popu-
lation does it, another considerable population
doesn’t (the control group), and smoking is
strongly correlated with a particular disease—
lung cancer. Have a look at Figure 4 for a hor-
tifying determinism. You can predict the exact
number of women who will die of lung cancer
in 1980 from the smoking they started in the
_’50s—over 60 per 100,000 population. For
those women, stopping smoking now won’t
help much. 1980 is next year.

|
|

i}
|
i
i
i

JARGON

Mutagenic—mutation causing (in-
cludes chromosome scrambling and
point mutations within chromo-
somes).

Carcinogenic—cancer causing.

Genotoxic—_DN A-damaging (com-
bines meanings of ‘““mutagenic’’ and
“carcinogenic’’).

Teratogenic—“‘monster’’-causing. Any
influence during pregnancy that
leads to birth defects. An unknown
proportion of teratogens are muta-
gens.

DNA—Desoxyribonucleic acid, the
“double helix” of material in chro-
mosomes that passes on cell and
whole-body characteristics. The re-
productive essence.

THE CHEMICAL TIDE

As smoking by some men dramatically in-
creased in the first half of this century, and
smoking by some women in mid-century, the
exposure of all of us to new chemicals has
taken off since World War II. In the next de-
cades we will be paying the price.

AMES: The tremendous increase in production of
chemicals, such as vinyl chloride, that started in the
mid-19505 may result in a steep increase in human
cancer in the 1980 decade if too many of these chem-
icals with widespread human exposure are indeed
powerful carcinogens.

For the 1980s, stopping all hazardous chemical
exposure now wouldn’t help much even if we
could.

About 4 million chemical substances have
been identified.“® Ames says over 50,000,
others say 63,000 are in common commercial
use in the United States’? and 1,000 new
chemicals are introduced each year. For a sense
of the volume of production and its recent in-
crease examine Figure 5. Worldwide the total
chemical business is $80,000,000,000 per

147

Stewart Brand

$,000 200
.
180
&
3,000
100
§ 2,000
ri r)
: 1,000
0
1900 1920 1940 1960 1980

Figure 4. Ames: Cigarette smoking and lung can-
cer are unmistakably related, but the nature of
the relationship remained obscure because of the
long latent period between the increase in ciga-
rette consumption and the increase in the inci-
dence of lung cancer. The data are from England
and Wales. In men (solid line) smoking began to
increase at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, but the corresponding trend in deaths from
lung cancer did not begin until after 1920. In
women (dotted line) smoking began later, and
lung cancers are only now appearing. *

*From J. Cairns, “The Cancer Problem,” Scientific
American (November, 1975), p. 72. Copyright 1975
by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Re-
printed by permission.

year.”” However you assess the current state of

technology and affluence in the world, chemi-
cal production and use is at the heart of it.
Now, despite the impression we get from
the newspapers, not all chemicals are carcino-
genic. Most are not. Of the 3,500 “ade-
quately” tested so far at the National Cancer
Institute for carcinogenicity in animals, only
750 tested positive, and those were suspect

chemicals being tested.“” Nevertheless most of

the chemicals in common use have yet to be
tested at all.

To correct another common impression,
Ames comments, “It isn’t that everything artifi-
cial 1s bad and natural is good, because there are a
wide variety of natural mutagens. For example,
Sugimura and his group in Japan have shown that
when you char food with a lot of protein in it you
make lots of mutagens. What the risk of that is we

148

ANNUAL DEATHS FROM LUNG CANCER (PER 100,000 POPULATION)

Figure 6. Cancer

in the 1980s

e and 1990s.
B_ Ethylene Dichloride
2S |(l,2-Dichloroethane) |
Ba 6
we
33
3 ?
bs :
33 4
e°

2

° L 1 ais °

1950 1960 1970 1980 1980 1990 2000 2010
YEAR YEAR

Figure 5. Ames: Production of two mutagens/car-
cinogens with widespread human exposure: eth-
ylene dichloride and vinyl! chloride (production
data from ““Top-50 Chemicals” issues of Chemical
and Engineering News). Approximately 100 bil-
lion Ibs. (5 X 10’° kilos) of ethylene dichloride
and over 50 billion lbs. of vinyl chloride have
been produced since 1960. Ethylene dichloride
is a volatile liquid that is the precursor of vinyl
chloride and is also used extensively as a fumi-
grant, solvent, gasoline additive (200 million
lbs/yr), and metal degreaser.

Ethylene dicholoride was first shown to bea
mutagen in Drosophila in 1960, and later in bar-
ley and Salmonella, but this fact has just been
completed by the National Center Institute (Sep-
tember, 1978) and is positive in both sexes of
both rats and mice. Vinyl chloride gas is used to
make polyvinyl chloride (PVC; vinyl) plastic. It
was shown to be a carcinogen in rats and in peo-
ple in the mid-1970s, and a mutagen in Sa/mo-
nella and other systems shortly afterwards.

don’t quite know. Obviously humans have been doing

it for quite a long time. On the other hand 25% of
us get cancer, and it’s likely that a good part of this
is due to cigarette smoking, ultraviolet light, and
natural carcinogens in our diet, as there hasn't been
time for the modern chemical world to really hit us

yet.

“A cigarette is, say, ten minutes off your life, and
people are willing to smoke two packs a day and live
eight years less than a nonsmoker. Smoking is fairly

addictive. If it turns out that a charcoal-broiled

steak 1s fifteen minutes off your life (I don’t know if

it’s that), maybe people will say, ‘What the hell, I

don’t eat them that often and they've good,’ and other

people may say, ‘I'd rather have a poached fish than
a broiled fish.’”’

|

i|

!

WPMD EO MR

t) 1-10 11-20 21-30 More

Numbers of cigarettes smoked daily

Figure 6. Semen changes in cigarette smokers.
Each circle and error bar represents the mean and
standard error of the level of sperm abnormalities
in groups of men who for more than 1 year
smoked the numbers of cigarettes indicated. In
order of increasing dose, each point is based on
50, 22, 43, 48, and 7 males, respectively. Re-
produced from Viczian.°”

9 10

Figure 7. Silhouettes of human sperm used by
Andrew Wyrobek at Lawrence Livermore Labora-
tory for scoring sperm samples from exposed sub-
jects. 1) Normal (oval), 2) small, 3) large, 4)
round, 5) doubles (heads, tails, etc.), 6) narrow-
at-the-base, 7) narrow, 8) pear, 9) irregular, 10)
“ghosts.”

Soot was the first environmental cause of
cancer to be identified (in 1775 by Sir Percival
Pott, investigating scrotal cancer in chimney

_ sweeps). One of the most potent mutagen/car-

_ cinogens known is aflatoxin, a biochemical
_ product of a naturally occurring fungus (some-

times found in peanut butter).

SMOKING

So there’s lots of chemical exposure, most of
it encountered unwillingly. But perhaps the

worst exposure is not only encountered will-

ingly, it’s sought and paid for by individual
choice.

AMES: “I'd be surprised if there are very many
things in the modern chemical world that do as much
damage as cigarettes. It’s clear they are causing life

Human Harm to Human DNA

EFFECTS OF FATHERS’ SMOKING ]

ON THEIR INFANTS

Cigarettes Severe
Smoked Daily Abnormalities
by Father in Babies

O 0.8%
I to IO 1.4%
more than 10 2.2%

From a study of 5,200 live births. G. Mau
and P. Netter, Dtsch. Med. Wschr. 99,
1113-1118 (1974). Fathers’ smoking af-
fects the incidence of abnormalities
whether the mother smokes or not. In ad-
dition, fathers’ smoking is associated with
an increase in perinatal mortality. (Com-
piled by Bruce N. Ames and Lois Swirsky
Gold.)

shortening, and I think more and more evidence will
come out for genetic effects in the children of
smokers .”’

It’s no wonder Ames is alert to this. As Ar-
thur Lubow reported in New Times, ‘‘Cigarette
smoke is so mutagenic that it knocks the Ames
test off the scale. ‘The Ames test can easily de-
tect smoke from 1/1ooth of a cigarette as
being mutagenic,’ says Byron Butterworth,
Director of Genetic Toxicology at the recently
established Chemical Industry Institute of
Toxicology. “We can’t allow smoking in the
laboratory.’ °°

Who the hell working in such a laboratory
would smoke?

As for genetic effects, several German stud-
ies appear to link smoking fathers with an in-
creased incidence of abnormal sperm, miscar-
riages and birth defects in their families.°”'*'”
The human sperm abnormality test for muta-
genicity that Andrew Wyrobek is developing
at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, may be use-
ful in pursuing this research. Ames and Yama-
saki were able to detect mutagens in the urine
of smokers (but not in nonsmokers), suggest-
ing that many parts of the body, perhaps in-
cluding the gonads, are indeed exposed to
some of the gram of mutagenic tars that the
two-pack smoker collects daily.”

149

Stewart Brand

Smoking mothers, according to a brand-new
analysis of 50,000 pregnancies by the United
States Collaborative Perinatal Project, signifi-
cantly increase their chances of miscarriage,
strongly increase the likelihood of birth de-
fects (usually fatal), and somewhat increase the
occurrence of crib death. Even if they stop
smoking before getting pregnant, they have a
higher risk of mislocated placenta and danger-
ous birth complications.°” To what degree
these problems are genetically caused is
unknown.

In the United States there are 80,000 cancer
deaths per year directly attributed to cigarette
smoking.°”

CANCER

You may recall in 1971, when the National
Cancer Act was passed, hearing public state-
ments such as, “We are so close to a cure for
cancer. We lack only the will and the kind of
money and comprehensive planning that went
into putting aman onthe moon. . . . Why
don’t we try to conquer cancer by America’s
200th birthday?” (Ref. 22, p. 322.)

Eight years and 4,762,000,000 dollars
later, you no longer hear such optimistic state-
ments. There has been notable success with
lymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, and
other relatively uncommon forms of cancer,
and good research has been funded that con-
tributes to understanding and preventing can-
cer, but many critics feel that the national “war
on cancer” has been an expensive defeat. (Ref.
22, pp. 14-15.) The now common critique of
what happened is well summarized by Paul
Ehrlich in Ecosczence:

It is now generally accepted that at least three
quarters of human cancers are “environmental”
in origin (that is, not caused by viruses, sponta-
neous breakdown of immune mechanisms, and
the like). . . . The scientists most involved in
the “war” were largely recruited from the ranks
of surgeons, biochemists, radiologists, and virol-
ogists—mostly people with little interest in
studying the release of carcinogens into the envi-
ronment or the possible nutritive factors involved
in the induction of cancers. . . . In the mid-

150

1970s it appeared likely that billions of dollars
will be spent during the rest of this century, at-
tempting to cure people whose sickness could
have been prevented.°”

Through 1976 the amount of the vast National
Cancer Institute budget spent on cancer pre-
vention was about 12%. It’s now increasing
markedly. (Ref. 22, p. 328.)

Interestingly, the Ames test came out of
pure research on bacterial genetics, work ina
completely different ballpark from cancer re-
search and funding. It’s also interesting that
Ames spends a considerable amount of his
time scanning and citing the work of people
well outside his own field.

NUCLEAR RADIATION

Currently the most active war-on-something
going on in America is the Guerilla War on
Nuclear Energy. It’s also the most successful—
indeed pinching off the construction of new re-
actors and receiving the acknowledgement and
approval of even Herman Kahn.

Oddly, most of the antinuclear attention
and emotion is focused on reactor safety. Odd,
at least, when you consider:

1) The prospect of nuclear war, the one ca-
tastrophe that overshadows everything else, in-
cluding population overload and the chemical
hazards discussed in this article. That interna-
tional encouragement of nuclear energy feeds
the proliferation of nuclear weapons seems the
strongest argument against a plutonium econ-
omy, even thinking only in terms of radiation
exposure.

2) The cultural perspective. Any society that
so discounts the future as to leave massive ra-
dioactive wastes earns the contempt of history.

3) The economics of reactor construction,
use, and dismantling—already bad and get-
ting worse.

4) The actual safety record of the nuclear in-
dustry, while not dazzling, is pretty good.

Radiation is the best-studied and under-
stood of all major pollutants. Nuclear reactors
are visible invaders on our landscape, and their
control or reduction because of safety, though
difficult, seems possible. Small wonder that so

|
|

Human Harm to Human DNA

much effort has gone in that direction, even
though greater hazard lies elsewhere.

The gut impulse—to protect the genera-

_ tions—is correct, and hopeful. It’s the only so-
cial cause on the roster right now that well-off
_ Americans are willing to go to jail for.

HUMAN GENE POOL
John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, the major

popularizers of nuclear genetic threat, have

written: “Changes in the chromosomes of
sperm or our precusor cells may be transmitted
to all future generations of humans. The he-

redity of man, his greatest treasure, is thereby
at stake. Once irreversibly injured, the chro-
mosomes cannot be repaired by any process
known to man.’°”

The Committee on Science and Public Pol-
icy of the National Academy of Sciences has

_ declared: ““The human gene pool is the primary

resource of mankind, today and tomorrow.
The present gene pool is the culmination of
three billion years of evolution and natural
selection.””®

How large is this greatest treasure, this pri-
mary resource? CQ reader Rob Roach has vol-
unteered the mathematics on the mass and vol-
ume of DNA it took to pass on all the heredity

_ of all the 20 billion Homo sapiens of the past

|
||
|
i
1
{|
|
|
|
i}
i
i
1
i

y

So:

and present (4.3 billion are alive now). The
grand total, measuring just the information-
bearing base pairs in the double helix of hu-
man DNA, is 0.08 grams. In volume, 0.2
milliliters.* Less than a teardrop.

While we're at it, what is the value of the
human gene pool in 1979 dollars?

A tiny resource, but intricately dispersed,

* Here’s how Rob Roach, of Olympia, Washington, figured it.

Assumptions: 20 billion people

Human DNA, uncoiled, is 1 meter
in length

Each base is about 3.2 A in length

Each base has a molecular weight of

about 400, or 400 g/mole

I meter

3.2 X 10 '°/meter (bases) > 3 X 10° bases

intricately protected, buffered, repaired, re-
newed. By some accounts our genes do not
work for us, we work for them.°” Consider
just the tests the chromosomes must pass dur-
ing conception and pregnancy. The male ejacu-
late ranges from 0.5 to 11 milliliters (!) with
on the average 80 to 110 million sperm per
milliliter. So an average wad has 300 million
sperm. Of those, 40% can’t swim very well
and some 12% to 27% are visibly abnormal.°®
The vast majority never make it to the egg,
even if they're deposited in a vagina, which is
uncontracepted, and a just-ripe egg is handy.
The few hundred who reach the egg perform an
elaborate dance around it and then, by an un-
known mechanism of selection, one gets
through.

Then follows the complex process of fertil-
ization, travel of the quickened egg to the
uterus, and implantation there. It is estimated
that one-third to one-half of all fertilized eggs
do not survive to implant.©” About 25% of
early spontaneously aborted embryos (up to 17
days after conception) have detectable chromo-
some abnormalities. Such early abortions are
usually not noticed; they are lost in what ap-
pears to be a late menstrual period. Selection
continues through pregnancy—14-17% of fe-
tuses after the fourth week are miscarried or
stillborn.°” Of spontaneously aborted fetuses
nearly two-thirds have chromosome
abnormalities.°”

BIRTH DEFECTS

All of that is good news, the working of an ef-
ficient and merciful gauntlet. However, 7% of
babies are born with birth defects—one out of

Then:

2 (DNA strands) X 20 X 10” (people) X 3 X 10° (bases)

6.023 X 10” (Avogadro’s Number)

20 X10)" f BD
sae melo IO” — 2X10 X 400 g/mole =

800 X 10° = 8 X 10” =.08 grams

or about .02 milliliters.

£51

Stewart Brand

fourteen. * Of those it is thought that 20% are
purely genetic, 20% purely environmental
(caused during pregnancy), and the remaining
60% an indistinguishable combination of ge-
netic and environmental.°” Some 2,336 differ-
ent kinds of birth defects have been identi-
fied—many more are assumed to exist.°”

Here we come to the heart of the matter—
the immeasurable and usually hidden suffering
that goes with having (or being) a defective
child. The event is frequently shattering for
the parents. The costs of special medical and
educational care are immense, both for the
family and the community at large. Though
some of the children are cheerful, most suffer
from their condition to degrees that can’t be
quantified—the constant fear of the hemophil-
iac (bleeder) of any minor accident that could
kill, the humiliation in public of the mal-
formed or incompetent, the endless obstacle
course of life in a wheelchair. Dependency.
Physical pain. Short lifespan. Guilt.

Rasés ast

GENETIC LOAD

Call the lives of the born-defective the social
load. They are the bodily expression of what is
termed the genetic load, which measures the
loss of fitness of a population due to the harm-
ful mutations carried in its gene pool.

Not all mutations are harmful, but since
they amount to random jiggering in a com-
plex, delicate process, the great preponderance
are deleterious, some are neutral, and a tiny
fraction may be advantageous. Also most mu-
tations are recessive—they are expressed only if
both parents have the same recessive trait. In
freshman Biology: Aa x Aa (the carrier—het-
erozygous—parents)—+AA (the dominant
homozygote) and Aa, Aa (more carrier hetero-
zygotes) and aa (the recessive homozygote
child, expressing the otherwise hidden trait).

* That’s the March of Dimes figure. Here’s their rap: 1
out of 10 families knows the anguish that comes with
having a birth-defect child; every year 250,000 babies are
born {in the United States} with significant birth defects;
at least 18,000 infants die in their first year because of
birth defects; 500,000 unborn babies die as a result of
birth defects every year.

152

Harmful recessive mutations—once they oc-
cur it is practically impossible to remove them
from the gene pool. They don’t increase, but
neither do they decrease. Even if the trait is le-
thal in the recessive homozygote (aa), it hides
and persists nearly indefinitely in the heterozy-
gotes. That’s not all bad—such variability in
the gene pool might be useful if conditions for
the organism change. Some of the genetic load
is insurance.

But most of it is pure load. All of us carry a
dozen or so lethal recessive genes that won't
show up unless we mate with someone with a
matching recessive (Ref. 26, p. 910). That oc-
curs more often with inbreeding groups such as
small island populations and religious sects,
and even more in consanguinous marriages
such as between cousins. Outbreeding there-
fore conceals new recessive mutations. These
days, when nearly anyone can mate with any-
one anywhere, such mutations may be assumed
to be collecting invisibly, to be expressed
much later (and perhaps more harmfully then,
for reasons to be seen).°*

That’s what’s maddening about human ge-
netics. Nearly everything is expressed so much
later—generations later—that you can’t track
anything back to its causes. Some nuclear en-
thusiast nonbiologists have rejoiced that not
many mutations turned up in the children of
the bombed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They
wouldn’t—not until the third generation and
then only if cousins marry. The mutations are
there—recessive, unremovable. And when
eventually they turn up they'll be indistin-
guishable from all other mutations except that
statistically there’ll be more.

Mutations vary in their harmfulness. Some
are lethal when expressed—they kill the em-
bryo before birth. Some are sublethal—they
live past birth and may even reproduce, but
they have “reduced fitness.” Others may be
subnoticeable—more on that later. One fasci-
nating idea of genetics is the Haldane-Muller
principle: Each individual harmful mutation is
in the end equally harmful—a lethal gene kills
right away, a sublethal spreads its harm over a
number of generations. As Garrett Hardin
points out, in a growing population such as

- Birth Without Violence

Physically normal baby—93% of
births.

ormation

- Recognizable Patterns of Human Mal}

Trisomy 13 Trisomy 18
syndrome syndrome

uvunyy Burdojaaaq aq I,

Human Harm to Human DNA

These are not easy pictures to look
at. But neither will it be easy to
change the habits—personal, com-
mercial, governmental, and mili-
tary—that are increasing the occur-
rence of such births.

Many birth defects look far worse
than these. I’ve included only ones
that may live past birth and are rela-
tively common. Also left out are the
more hidden defects—muscular dys
trophy, heart malformations, diabe-
tes mellitus, cystic fibrosis, sickle
cell anemia, hemophilia, PKU, and
Huntington’s chorea. These photos
and most information with them
come from two excellent medical
texts: Keith L. Moore, The Developing
Human, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: W. B.
Saunders, 1977); and David W.
Smith, Recognizable Patterns of Hu-
man Malformation, 2d ed. (Philadel-
phia: W. B. Saunders, 1976).

The usual image of lethal human
folly is the skull. The faces of these
children may carry a more accurate
impact. Death is an end and space
for a renewal—the genes expressed
here live on.

As Down’s syndrome is the result of
three chromosomes No. 21 rather
than the usual two, these defects re-
sult from tripling of chromosomes
13, and 18. Trisomies tend to in-
crease with maternal age, and to
some extent the tendency is inher-
ited. The incidence of Trisomy 21
(Down’s syndrome) is 1/660, of Tri-
somy 18 is 1/3500, and of Trisomy
13 is 1/7000. Both of the latter two
are severely defective physically and
mentally. Most don’t survive the first
year.

153

The Developing Human

Stewart Brand

Spina bifida, an externalization of the spinal cord,
is one of the commonest forms of birth defect. Inci-
dence is 1/375. In the United States 6,200 new-
born a year have either spina bifida or hydrocepha-
lus (below). Many survive birth: 53,000 are alive,
under 20, in the United States.

The Developing Human

Hydrocephalus, said to occur in 1/550 births, re-
sults from the accumulation of spinal fluid in the

skull. Sometimes the condition develops after
birth.

154

Thalidomide, a sedative prescribed to mothers be-
cause of its apparent absence of side effects, caused
over 7,000 babies to be born with various degrees of
limb malformation. The children are now reaching
college age.

UuOIIVULMO[IDY UPUuM FT fo SUsa1ID a1qVZ1USOIOY

Another known teratogen is alcohol. This 2% year
old shows Fetal Alcohol syndrome, resulting from
her mother’s chronic alcoholism. Such babies have a
17% death rate at birth. The survivors have weak
bodies, an average IQ of 63, and possible brain
malformation.

uewueATy Su7tdnws14-4 471 +

Human Harm to Human DNA

The Developing Human

Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation

_ Achondroplasia, a form of dwarf- The result of inbreeding ina A 16-year-old with Marfan’s
ism, results from a dominant Brazilian population, Grebe’s syndrome, resulting in this case
| gene. Occurrence is about syndrome has affected 47 chil- from a new mutation since no
_ 1/10,000, with about 90% dren. Some died in infancy. other cases were known in her
_ thought to be the product of new family. Mean age of survival for
mutations. Intelligence is nor- individuals with the condition
_ mal. If this child reproduced, is 45.
_ half of his children would have

the defect.

The Developing Human

uo1jwuLso fv uvunzy fo susaqiyg aqvziusosay

_ A microcephalic infant has a normal-sized face but Turner’s syndrome—a ten-day-old female possess-
\ underdeveloped cranial vault, leading to severe ing only one X chromosome instead of the usual

_ mental retardation. This defect, sometimes two. The child will grow up with short stature,

_ genetic, has also been associated with exposure to perhaps mild mental retardation. Incidence is

_ ionizing radiation during pregancy. 1/5,000.

155

UuoLIvUO{IDIY UUM FY {0 SUsa1IMd 3190Z1US0I0Y

Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation

Stewart Brand

Mother and daughter with Marfan’s syndrome.

ours, “The less harmful genes exact a greater
numerical toll than the more harmful, because
a larger proportion of the loss is postponed to
the later generations when the population is
larger.” (Ref. 34, p. 267.)

MUTATION RATE

Dominant harmful mutations also occur, and
since they are expressed and selected against
right away, the ones that show up are usually
recent.°” With dominants then, as with sex-
linked aberrations that are distinct because
they’re in the X chromosome, you can get a
better idea about the mutation rate than you
can with recessives.

It’s low. The average mutation rate per gene
per generation is estimated at 1/1,000,000
(Ref. 35, p. 107) to 1/100,000.°° So what are

156

Normal adult.

we worrying about? One in a million is long
odds. Besides, all you’re doing is adding a lit-
tle additional variability to an enormous pool
of genetic variability already in the popula-
tion—some say the existing variability is
5,000 times greater than is added by muta-
tions to a single generation (Ref. 36, p. 72).
(That’s why mutation rate has scant effect on
the rate of evolution, which runs on
variability.)

The problem is that most mutations are
harmful and they can’t be corrected, they have
to be selected out, which takes time. And look
at the whole picture: “Among hundreds or
even thousands of genetic diseases and malfor-
mations known in man, most have an inci-
dence of 1:10,000 or less. Taken all together,
these deficits nevertheless add up to a genetic

Human Harm to Human DNA

load which is by no means negligible.” (Ref.
36, p. 108.)

It’s getting foggy (it will get worse)—no
one seems to know exactly how harmful an in-
crease in human mutation rate is. Referring
just to radiation, H. L. Carson in the new En-
cyclopaedia Britannica article on Human Ge-
netics writes, “There is a general dread that a
doubling dose of radiation to the human
population of the world would end in major
calamity.”°”

Nobel geneticist Joshua Lederberg said in

1970:

I believe that the present standards of population
exposure to radiation should and will (at least de
facto) be made more stringent, to about one per-
cent of the spontaneous {mutation] rate, and that
this is also a reasonable standard for the maxi-
mum tolerable mutagenic effect of any environ-
mental chemical (better for them in the aggre-
gate). . . . Aten percent increase in the existing
“spontaneous” mutation rate is, in effect, the
standard that has been adopted as the “maximum
acceptable” level of public exposure to radiation
by responsible regulatory bodies. (Ref. 25, pp.
186-187.)

Bruce Ames recently asked, “If there were
a doubling in human genetic birth defects,
would we know it? Is that being studied?”

Last August [1978] in Moscow, Nikolai Du-
binin, head of the Soviet Institute of General
Genetics, speaking to over 2,000 geneticists at
the International Congress of Genetics, de-
clared that the percentage of children in the
world born with birth defects has doubled over
the last twenty-five years, largely because of
increase of mutagens in the environment.
“This shows that the human race and human
heredity are entering a dangerous phase.’”*”
(By reputation, human genetic epidemiology
in the U.S.S.R. is ahead of ours.)

On this subject environmentalist/scientist
Paul Ehrlich draws a clear distinction between
what should be said politically and what can be
said scientifically. Political: “Doing anything
that spontaneously increases the mutation rate
in Homo sapiens is a dumb idea.” Scientific: “It’s
very difficult for me to see exactly what kind of
statement can be made about what the human

SELECTION PRESSURE )

« MUTATION PRESSURE

STRONG SELECTION PRESSURE

MIDPLING SELECIION PRESSURE

WEAK SELECTION PRESSURE

PROBABILITY
OF GENE
FREQUENCY
ecORe
FREQUENCY

OF
POPULATIONS

O V4 % My i
FAVORABLE GENE FREQUENCY

Figure 8. “Survival of the fittest,” if ic were true,
would dangerously limit an organism’s variabil-
ity. “The fittest is favored” more closely approxi-
mates biological reality—maximizing the advan-
tage of a favorable gene while keeing a reserve of
some variability. If there is less selection pres-
sure, then “favorable” is less strongly favored,
and and more variability is expressed. The same
happens with increased mutation rate—a de-
creased proportion of favorable genes. Humans
are simultaneously lowering their selection pres-
sure and increasing their mutations rate—de-
creasing favorable genes on both counts. (From
Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate, ref. 34,

pees2))

population consequences of the level of circu-
lation of mutagens—or of radiation for that
matter—is likely to be. It’s a very difficult
technical problem.”

About nonhuman species Ehrlich has more
certainty: “The argument for protecting nature
by reducing mutagens is a crappy argument.
In a Drosophila {fruit fly} population or a lizard
population if you have a dose of radiation that
causes a very high genetic load, selection will
quickly reduce it. A Drosophila population
doesn’t go into shock if it loses half of its indi-
viduals or 90% of its individuals in a genera-
tion or for 20 generations. That would be
tough for Homo sapiens. If humanity could ac-
cept a selective mortality of 90% for 20 gener-
ations, we wouldn’t have to worry about muta-
gens increasing our genetic load.”

What’s the difference between us and liz-
ards? Self-interest obviously. Culture per-

157

Stewart Brand

haps—is civilization, language, prolonged
child-rearing, etc., more or less vulnerable
to increased genetic load? I don’t know of
any formal speculation on that one. But one
difference we’re sure of, selection pressure
on humans is lower than on other species.
We've lowered it ourselves, first through the
agricultural revolution, then through the
industrial and medical revolutions. Albinos,
bleeders, genetic dwarfs, those born blind,
deaf, or feebleminded can survive now, and
some reproduce. Former lethal defects are
made sublethal, former sublethals are made
almost normal, somewhat unfit are made
fully fit. That’s immediate humanitarian
good news, long-term genetic bad news. In-
stead of being selected out, deleterious genes
are accumulating. *

National Academy of Sciences:

Having thwarted the historical process of natural
selection against our disadvantageous genes, Civ-
ilization must now provide an acceptable substi-
tute. . . . As medical euphenics (“‘eu” = well,
“phen” = appearance) becomes increasingly suc-
cessful, it will become increasingly important
that genetic counseling be universally practiced.
Otherwise, in a few generations, the ethic which
guides medical practice will have seriously dam-
aged the heritage of countless previous genera-
tions. (Ref. 26, p. 911.)

SUBNOTICEABLE SUBLETHAL MUTATIONS

Knowledge of human genetic epidemiology—
who has what—-1s sufficiently imprecise that
numerical estimates have a way of varying ten-
fold, at least in the issues we’ve addressed so
far. Now let’s proceed to where there are no
agreed-upon numbers at all—genetic effects
on general fitness, behavior, intelligence, and
such.

Geneticists have good reason to be leery of
this subject, as it leads promptly to endless ar-
guments over nature/nurture (genetic inheri-

* This is not exactly an original fret. It dates back to
Francis Galton in 1865 and has had a number of distin-
guished and undistinguished (A. Hitler et a/.) proponents
since then.

158

tance vs. upbringing), race and IQ, etc. The
arguments are endless because they are based
as much on articles of faith as on the scanty,
blurry data. We'll skip the argument and re-
port the general agreement that there is
““some’’—unquantified—genetic component
to IQ (Ref. 35, p. 618), to schizophrenia (Ref.
35, p. 623), and most disease. To some degree
in this domain, genetic like begets like.

I'm calling these traits, which may increase
with higher mutation rate, “subnoticeable”’
because you don’t know at its birth that you’ve
got one and you don’t know later when you do
have one whether it’s genetic or not—that’s
four ignorances stacked up right there. It leads
to an ignorant assertion: if selection pressure is
reduced against subnoticeable sublethal traits
the unfavorable traits will gradually increase,
particularly if mutation rate is increasing. * I
can’t prove it. You can’t disprove it. We both
can worry about it—it’s vague all right, but as
clouds go it is large and dark. Are we accumu-
lating sublethal genes for which humanity may
pay a high price in the future?

Disease is worth a closer look. A good sum-
mary of the situation may be found in “Envi-
ronmental Mutagenic Hazards,” a special pa-
per prepared by the Council of the Environ-
ment Mutagen Society and printed in Sczence in

1975:

Many geneticists believe that man’s genes consti-
tute his most precious heritage, and that a dete-
rioration in gene quality can result in a corre-
sponding decrease in the quality of life. Steady
progress in the control of infectious diseases,
lengthening human life spans, and improved
procedures for identifying genetic disorders have
revealed an important residue of genetic disease
in human populations. An impressive proportion
of hospital admittances, for instance, are now
recognized as reflecting genetic disabilities.°”
The prospects for directly curing the resulting

* Ehrlich puts it more precisely: “The proportion of
deaths caused by selection in human populations is vastly
lower than in most other species. . . . The reproductive
differentials between genotypes that are the essence of
natural selection are probably smaller today in Homo Sa-
piens than in the past.”

Human Harm to Human DNA

genetic diseases, in contrast to merely alleviating
their symptoms, are poor, and are not likely to
improve in the near future. Furthermore, the
wide variety of mechanisms by which radiations
and chemicals induce mutations“ make it very
unlikely that generalized schemes can be devised
to protect against mutagens, except by avoiding
them in the first place.“”

CHEMICAL TERATOGENS

More fuzziness: you often can’t tell a genetic
birth defect from one caused during preg-
nancy— ‘the mechanism initiated by the ge-
netic factor may be identical or similar to the
causal mechanism initiated by an environmen-
tal teratogen.” (Ref. 29, p. 123.) Furthermore,
the same substance may cause both. That
makes sense. If a mutagen is also probably a
carcinogen, then it’s also likely to be a terato-
gen. The cells in an embryo are multiplying
rapidly and fragilely—DNA disruption ts
bound to be disastrous to the development.

(Of course there are a number of teratogens
that don’t cause mutations or cancer—mostly
infectious agents such as German measles or
herpes simplex {Ref. 29, p. 139}. Perhaps if
the term “genotoxic’’ comes into common use
to link the meaning of mutagenic and carcino-
genic, it should also cover part of teratogenic,
and a new term should be coined for the non-
DNA-disrupting causes of birth defects.)

If the case can be at least loosely made that
teratogens overlap with other genotoxins, then
birth defects and miscarriages can be studied as
a human indicator of exposure to widely dan-
gerous substances. More and more of the scien-
tific literature (for example Sczence, Science News,
New Scientist) is doing exactly that. So far it’s
the only avenue of direct evidence we have that
mutagenic chemicals are in fact harming the
human gene line, and still all we have is hints
and glimpses.

The wzves of vinyl chloride workers have a
significantly higher rate of fetal deaths, or mis-
carriages. The 70 exposed husbands studied
and the 95 control husbands (working with
other chemicals) had a 6—7% fetal death rate in
their families Jefore exposure. The vinyl chlo-
ride workers had a 12—20% fetal death rate

after exposure—double to triple that of the
control group.“ Vinyl chloride is clearly mu-
tagenic on the Ames test and other short-term
tests and is a carcinogen in rats and people.

An exhaustive survey of nearly 50,000 oper-
ating room personnel (compared with 24,000
other hospital workers) has shown that waste
anesthetic gases are affecting women and men.
The results, corrected for age and smoking
habits, show a 50% to 100% increase of mis-
carriages and birth defects (and a 30—90% in-
crease in cancer) with the exposed women.
Children of the exposed men had a 25% high-
er rate of birth defects—“‘this unexpected
finding represents a matter for serious con-
cern and deserves further investigation.”

The study was made because of preliminary
reports that miscarriages were more frequent
among operating room women. Venting sys-
tems are now being installed in operating
rooms.“

Enter “Behavioral Teratogens—Birth De-
fects of the Mind,” as reported by Gina Bari
Kolata in Sczence, 17 November 1978. Some
excerpts:

To many people, the idea that children may have
lower intelligence or impaired behavior because
they were exposed in the womb to certain drugs or
foreign substances is at least as disturbing as the
idea that they may be physically deformed. . . .

Behavioral teratologists are looking for subtle
and common defects—shorter attention span,
lower intelligence, or hyperactivity, for
example: 4. .

The implication of obstetric medications as
behavioral teratogens may have far-reaching con-
sequences because these drugs are so commonly
used. In a recent colloquium, Yvonne Brackbill
of the University of Florida estimated that
women are given medications in 95 percent of all
labors and deliveries in this country. . . . When
the babies in these studies were tested at 4
months, 8 months, and 12 months of age, those
whose mothers were heavily medicated lagged in
development of their ability to sit, stand, and
move about. They were also deficient in develop-
ing inhibitory abilities, such as the ability to
stop responding to redundant signals, to stop
crying when comforted, and to stop responding
to distracting stimuli. As they grew older, their

159

Stewart Brand

development of language and cognitive skills
lagged or was impaired... .

It is now clear that behavioral defects can oc-
cur in the absence of physical malformations.
Moreover, the fetus is vulnerable to brain damage
throughout gestation—there is no safe period.
Finally, drugs that in high doses produce physi-
cal malformations often produce behavioral de-
fects in lower doses. . . . Possibly women have
already been exposed to a behavioral teratogen
comparable to thalidomide in its potency. But,
unlike thalidomide, the effects of such a behav-
ioral teratogen would have gone unnoticed in the
general population.“

The teratologists and psychological testers
have only recently found each other and com-
bined their skills. May they soon link up with
genetic epidemiologists and environmentalists
and test the children of vinyl chloride workers,
nuclear industry workers, farm workers ex-
posed to pesticides, and forest industry people
and Vietnam vets exposed to herbicides.
Maybe they’ll find nothing.

That’s it, that’s the argument—from muta-
gens to carcinogens to teratogens to behavioral
teratogens, with a lot of uncertain genetics
thrown in. We know that the human mutation
rate and genetic load are increasing. We know
that selection pressure is decreasing. We don’t
know quantities or much about causes or any-
thing about consequences.

RESPONSIBILITY

Bruce Ames commented to Paul Ehrlich, “If
the smokers are filling the gene pool with mu-
tations and their children are going to marry
your children, then one has to really think
about the societal responsibility. It isn’t only a
matter of individual choice.”

Ehrlich replied, “Bruce, you have as much
to do with my thinking on this as anyone. If it
is true that mutagenicity and carcinogenicity
are caused by the same kinds of phenomena,
the problems perceived by human beings will
always be much more serious on the cancer
end, because before you would get a level of
mutagenicity that would make much differ-
ence to the ‘gene pool’ everybody would be
dying of cancer. So biologists tend not to be
very concerned with the quality of the human

160

gene pool whereas the social load of cancer is
enormous.”

Ames retorted that the social cost of a defec-
tive child lasts a whole lifetime whereas cancer
is in general a disease of old age. And a harm-
ful gene will be harmful generations after the
cancer patient is out of the picture.

The fact is, whether you’re more worried
about cancer or genetic damage, we have both
and both are increasing. If you smoke and
you're my friend Il] look at you with one kind
of dismay; if you’re my mother-in-law I'll look
at you with another.

In any case it would be well if more prospec-
tive parents sought genetic counseling and if
more doctors were trained in it. Nobel geneti-
cist Hermann Muller, known for his enthusi-
asm for eugenics, made this fair statement:

What is most needed in this area of living is an
extension of the feeling of social responsibility to
the field of reproduction: an increasing recogni-
tion that the chief objective of bringing children
into the world is not the glorification of the par-
ents or ancestors by the mere act of having chil-
dren but the well-being of the children them-
selves and, through them, of subsequent
generations in general.“

What this article should have demonstrated is
that far more than just the parents are involved
in that responsibility.

Of course, we could wait for a cure for can-
cer and a corrective for mutations. It may bea
long wait. DNA damage is on the molecular
level. How would you detect which body cell
or which germ cell is the critical defective one,
and which gene is defective, and what the de-
fect is—before they’re expressed? Then how
would you reach in, with what tweezers, and
make what correction and keep the whole mess
alive? As they say, genetic disease resists
treatment.

Well, then, how about eugenics? We could
keep our mutagens and embark on a national/
world policy of active favorable selection, or, if
that sounds too Hitlerian, settle for compre-
hensive negative eugenics. Sterilize workers ex-
posed to high levels of mutagens and provide a
hazardous-duty fund for their later cancer
treatments. Sterilize everyone who survives in-

Human Harm to Human DNA

fancy with birth defects. Sterilize people who
are kinda dumb. Be sure never to be racist,
sexist, ageist, or elitist.

Folksinger Woody Guthrie died long and
slow of Huntington’s chorea—a sublethal
dominant genetic disease of the nervous system
brought to this country by just three immi-
grant families from England. It has affected
7,000 individuals since then. If Woody had
been sterilized or genetically counseled not to
reproduce, there would be no folksinger Arlo
Guthrie. Should Arlo have had kids?

Genetic responsibility is just entering pub-
lic consciousness. We'll be decades, perhaps
centuries, sorting out its rights and wrongs.
Better for now to concentrate on reducing the
mutagenic hazards.

ACTION—PERSONAL

For both reasons, lay off items that appear to
cause cancer—cigarettes, hair dyes, nitrites in

| meats (that’s one I’ve just dropped thanks to all

this), unnecessary x-rays, unnecessary anes-
thetics, chronic alcohol or drug use, pesticides,
herbicides, moldy nuts, charred meat or fish,
too much fat, food additives generally, medical
drugs generally including birth control pills,
aerosol cans, cleaning agents with benzene or
chlorinated compounds (carbon tetrachloride,
trichlorethylene, etc.), asbestos insulation,
wallboard, etc., and whatever else turns up on
the endangering list.

If you're pregnant, take this list quadru-
pally seriously.

As for political action, the usual: research,
bitch, organize, boycott, demonstrate, publi-
cize, vote, help, and thank.

Has your local population had a sudden rise
in babies born dead with spina bifida associated
with increased local herbicide spraying? Nail
one of them to the door of the agency
responsible. *

ACTION—COMMERCIAL

Here’s three quick stories from Arthur Lubow’s
1977 article on Bruce Ames in New Times:

* Would I actually do this? I wouldn’t. Someone else
might, and people in the relevant companies and bureau-
cracies should be thinking about that.

1) When American Cyanamide found that an ag-
ricultural chemical tested weakly positive on the
Ames test, it was able to identify and eliminate
the guilty contaminant. Merck Sharpe and
Dohme, which has been using an Ames screen-
ing test for the last three years, also discovered a
slightly mutagenic impurity in one of its drugs.
The impurity has been removed, although it has
not yet been identified.

2) Bruce Ames stumbled on Tris while buying
pajamas for his two small children. He noticed
that the pajamas were flame-resistant, and won-
dered what chemicals had been added to the
cloth. Calling his friend Mike Prival, who was
then at the Environmental Protection Agency in
Washington, Ames learned that the chemical
was named Tris. Tris was already on the EPA list
of suspect carcinogens, and Prival had added it
to a list of compounds being run through an
Ames test as part of a general validation study of
bacterial assays. “I was surprised when Bruce
called, because I didn’t know that anybody out-
side our small group was concerned about Tris,”
Prival recalls. “Although, from its structure, you
would think it would be pretty bad, certainly if
you had a background like Bruce’s.”

On the EPA Salmonella test that had been un-
derway before Ames called, Tris tested positive as
a mutagen. The chief of Prival’s section wrote a
letter to the Consumer Products Safety Commis-
sion in October 1975. The commission required
the use of Tris to flame-proof children’s sleeping
garments. ‘‘We informed them that we had
found Tris was mutagenic in the bacterial test,”
Prival says. The commission began investigating
absorption of Tris through the skin. At the same
time, the NCI was conducting animal assays of
Tris. The NCI report implicating Tris as a car-
cinogen was announced early in 1977, after Bob
Harris of the Environmental Defense Fund pres-
sured NCI into releasing it. A few weeks later,
the Consumer Products Safety Commission an-
nounced its in-house study showing Tris absorp-
tion through the skin. The chemical was banned
as a flame retardant in children’s clothing—
about a year and half after it had been identified
as a probable carcinogen by the Salmonella test. *

For that year and a half, millions of children
slept in Tris-coated pajamas, soaking up the
chemical when they sweated, when they chewed

* Asa result of this experience corrective staff and policy
changes have been made at the Consumer Products Safety
Commission.

161

Stewart Brand

on the cloth, when they did nothing but lie still.
Because the scrotum is particularly absorbent, it
sponged up more than its fair share of Tris.
Ames fears that the Tris generation of boys may
suffer an unusually high rate of sperm cell ge-
netic damage, and possibly testicular atrophy
and sterility. ‘““The more we looked at Tris, the
more dangerous it seemed,” he says. “In hind-
sight, it was a crazy idea in the first place. Re-
lated compounds were known to be carcinogenic,
and the structure of these compounds suggested
they could be.” For a year Ames, Prival, and
Harris tried without success to get the commis-
sion to do something. “These government bur-
eaucracies are very slow to react,” he says. He is
today fighting the almost incredible plan to sub-
stitute inadequately studied Tris-related sub-
stances as flame retardants in children’s clothing
now that Tris is banned. “The replacements
they’re using look bad,” Ames says. ‘I don’t like
the whole idea of add-on flame retardants of this
type. I’ve been on the phone to all the commis-
sioners and I think they’re coming around, but I
think they’re hemmed in by what their powers
are.”

3) If a new carcinogen is substituted for an old
one, it won't be the first time. One of the saddest
ironies in the annals of cancer prevention is the
case of decaffeinated coffee. In February 1976 the
NCI found that trichloroethylene, a solvent used
to decaffeinate coffee, was weakly carcinogenic in
mice. “Trichloroethylene is about the weakest
carcinogen, with the possible exception of sac-
charin, that has ever been found in animals,” says
Ames’ colleague Joyce McCann. Because trichlo-
roethylene is so nontoxic, enormous doses of it
could be fed to laboratory animals. When mega-
doses were pumped into mice through a stomach
tube three times a week, tumors appeared in a
significant number of animals. “When we
started this test, we didn’t know that trichloro-
ethylene was used as a solvent for decaffeinating
coffee,” says NCI’s Elizabeth Weisburger. “After
we published a technical report, General Foods
contacted us.”

Under the recently celebrated Delaney clause,
which required the banning of saccharin, any
trace element of a carcinogen like trichloroethy-
lene in Sanka, however weak, would be forbid-
den. General Foods didn’t wait for the FDA to
issue a regulation. It quickly switched from
trichloroethylene to another industrial solvent,
methylene chloride. It was going from bad to
worse.

162

“One needs only to look at the structure of
these chemicals,” Joyce McCann says in exaspera-
tion. “There are plenty of chemists at General
Foods, and they can look at these chemicals and
draw the same conclusions we do. Yet there is
this attitude that seems to throw all caution to
the winds, and to use this chemical until it is
proved to be a carcinogen. It seems so irresponsi-
ble.” As Ames observes: “Trichloroethylene has
been replaced by methylene chloride, which is
more mutagenic than trichloroethylene on the
Salmonella test, but which hadn’t had a cancer
test done on it.” A paper soon to be published by
Paul Price of Microbiological Associates in La
Jolla reveals that methylene chloride is two to
three times as potent in malignantly transform-
ing rat cells as the discontinued trichloroethy-
lene. (Ref. 16, pp. 30-33.)

Until business learns to serve the whole cus-
tomer it will be regarded as an untrustworthy
and dangerous adversary by consumers, work-
ers, and the government.

ACTION—GOVERNMENT

AMES: The problem of cancer and genetic birth de-
fects can be usefully attacked by prevention. The fol-
lowing approaches are suggested.

1. Identifying mutagens and carcinogens
from among the wide variety of environmental chem-
icals to which humans are exposed. All approaches
must be used: human epidemiology for cancer and for
genetic birth defects; animal tests for cancer and for
genetic birth defects; short-term mutagenicity and
transformation tests; and new approaches based on
measuring damage in people must be developed.“°*”

2. Pre-market testing of new chemicals to
which humans will be exposed. We have seen, and
will continue to see, the folly of using people as
guinea pigs.

3. Making information more easily available
on chemucals capable of causing cancer and muta-
tions (including their relative danger, when this 1s
known) for use by the state and federal governments,
industry, unions, consumer groups, and the public at
large.

4. Setting priorities and minimizing human
exposure fo these chemicals, starting with those that
need the most attention and working down the list.
These would be based on the respective amounts of
human exposure to each chemical and the potency of

Human Harm to Human DNA

the chemical in animal cancer tests. Where adequate
animal cancer data are not available, potency infor-
mation from several suitable short-term tests—
such as Salmonella, which can be obtained
quickly—might be substituted when they are
validated for this purpose. (Soon more sophis-
ticated and sensitive ways of measuring DNA
or other damage in people could play an essen-
tial role.) The particular ‘chemical of concern”
at any one time may often be a mixture, such
as air pollutants from auto exhaust (which ts
quite mutagenic in Salmonella). A general at-
tack on a problem may sometimes be called for, for
example, minimizing the use of mutagenic, carcino-
genic, or untested chemical pesticides by education
about potential hazards, product use, or alterna-
tives, and incentives, penalties, and taxes where
NECESSATY.

ALLIES

As occupational exposure to genotoxic chemicals
is probably the greatest hazard right now, labor
unions have a primary responsibility and capa-
bility. Alliance with their efforts by environ-
mental groups would be poignant (given past
disagreements) and probably highly effective.

The politicians and medical heavyweights
who managed to channel billions of dollars
into curing cancer should not find it difficult to
re-channel their efforts into prevention. The
apparatus is in place. All that’s needed is better
aim. Signs are it’s already happening.“

The highly capable veterans of battles with
nuclear energy can use the same skills and
commitment against the subtler, greater haz-
ard of chemical mutagens. There’s no need to
switch targets, just go at the whole problem.

The health food nuts, who were right all
along, can avoid smugness by further refining
their research and expanding their activity. As
an informed electorate and vast consumer pop-
ulation, they may have more leverage than they
realize.

How about the Right-to-Life people? A hu-
man-caused increase in spontaneous abortions
should be of interest to them.

And keep an eye out for artists who translate
the hidden into the obvious. DEVO, for in-
stance—the thinking man’s punk-rock band.

Expounding “The Truth about De-evolution,”
these spuds, these robotoid Rollerball corpo-
rate clones, these happy mongoloids have a
lively deadly music for you. Each concert be-
gins with a litany. The band demands:
“ARE WE NOT MEN?”
And we in the crowd reply in a numb me-

chanical mass-market singsong:
“WE ARE DEVO.”
Maybe so.

REFERENCES

1. Bruce Ames, “Identifying Environmental Chemicals
Causing Cancer and Mutations,” Science, Spring 1979; ed-
ited from “Environmental Chemicals Causing Cancer and
Genetic Birth Defects: Developing a strategy to mini-
mize human exposure,” California Policy Seminar series,
monograph no. 2. Berkeley Institute of Governmental
Studies, University of California, 1978.

2. R. Doll, Nature, 265, 589 (1977).

3. Origins of Human Cancer, H. H. Hiatt, J. D. Watson,
and J. A. Winsten, eds. (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 1977).

4. E. P. Benditt, Scientific American 230, 74 (1977).

5. F.M. Burnett, Intrinsic Mutagenesis: A genetic approach
to aging (Lancaster, England: Medical and Technical Pub-
lishing, 1974).

6. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, L. Fishbein,
Potential Industrial Carcinogens and Mutagens, 560/5—77—
005 (1977); T. H. Maugh II, Science 199, 162 (1978).

7. “Evaluation of Genetic Risks of Environmental
Chemicals: Report of a symposium held at Skokloster,
Sweden, March 11-15, 1972,” C. Ramel, ed., Ambzo
Special Report no. 3 (1973).

8. Claes Ramel, ‘“The Detection and Control of Muta-
genic and Carcinogenic Compounds in the Environ-
ment,” Ambio, vol. 7, no. 5—6 (1978), p. 244.

9. J. McCann, E. Choi, E. Yamasaki, and B. N. Ames,
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sct. U.S.A. 72, 5135 (1975); J. Mc-
Cann and B. N. Ames, ibid. 73, 950 (1976); J. McCann
and B. N. Ames, in Origins of Human Cancer, pp. 1431-
1450, see ref. 3 above.

10. Thomas H. Maugh II, “Chemical Carcinogens: The
Scientific Basis for Regulation,” Science, 29 September
1978, pp. 1200-1205.

11. T.R. Torkelson, S. E. Sadek, V. K. Rowe, J. K.
Kodama, H. H. Anderson, G. S. Loguvam, and C. H.
Hine, Toxicol. Appl. Pharma. 3, 545 (1961).

12. W. A. Olson, R. T. Huberman, E. K. Weisburger,
J.M. Ward, and J. H. Weisburger, J. Nat. Cancer Inst.
51, 1993 (1973).

13. A. Blum and B. N. Ames, Sczence 195, 17 (1977);
M. J. Prival, E.C. McCoy, B. Gutter, and H. S. Rosen-
kranz, Sczence 195, 76 (1977).

14. Chemical Abstracts Service,, Report no. 5, p. 2
(1976). Cited in “Chemicals and the Environment,” Am-
bio, vol. 7, no. 5—6 (1978), p. 240.

163

Stewart Brand

15. Jan W. Huismans, “The International Register of
Potentially Toxic Chemicals (IRPTC): Its Present State of
Development and Future Plans,” Ambzo, vol. 7, no. 5—6
(1978), Pp. 275.

16. Arthur Lubow, “Bruce Ames Escalates the War on’
Cancer,” New Times, 16 September 1977, p. 32.

17. M. Viczian, “Ergebnisse von Spermaunterzuchun-
gen bei Zigarettenrauchen,” Z. Haut Geschlectskr. 44,
183—187 (1969). Cited in Andrew J. Wyrobek and W.
Robert Bruce, “The Induction of Sperm-shape Abnor-
malities in Mice and Humans,” Chemical Mutagens, vol.
5, p. 274 (Plenum Publishing Corporation, 1978).

18. K. H. Degenhardt, Conference on Population Monitor-
ing Methods for Detecting Increased Mutation Rates, Jahres-
konferenz 1975 (Zentrallaboratorium fiir Mutagenitat-
sprifung, Freiburg, West Germany, 1975) p. 34. Cited
in Ramel, ref. 8, above.

19. G. Mau and P. Netter, Dtsch. med. Wschr. 99 1113-
1118 (1974).

20. Edith Yamasaki and Bruce N. Ames, ‘“‘Concentra-
tion of mutagens from urine by adsorption with the non-
polar resin XAD-2: Cigarette smokers have mutagenic
urine,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, vol. 74, no. 8 (1977)
PP. 3555-3559.

21. “Smoking Imperils the Unborn,” Science News, 27
January 1979, p. 55.

22. Samuel S. Epstein, The Politics of Cancer (San Fran-
cisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978), p. 24.

23. Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P.
Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San
Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1970, 1972, 1977), pp. 591
and 597.

24. “Herman Kahn Changes His Mind,” CoEvolution
Quarterly, Spring 1978, p. 141.

25. John W. Gofmann and Arthur Tamplin, “How Ra-
diation Causes Disease and Hereditary Alterations,” En-
cyclopedia of Common Diseases (Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Ro-
dale Press, 1976), p. 185.

26. Biology and the Future of Man, Philip Handler, ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 902.

27. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York and
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976).

28. Andrew Wyrobek, (Ref. 17, above), p. 270.

29. Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically
Oriented Embryology, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saun-
ders, 1977), p. 42.

30. B. K. Trimble and J. H. Doughty, “The Amount of
Hereditary Disease in Human Populations,” Ann. Human
Gen., 38 (1974) pp. 179-209. Cited in ref. 36, p. 107.

31. J. Boué and A. Boué, Biomedicine 18, 372 (1973).
Cited in Claes Ramel (Ref. 8 above), p. 245.

32. “What Are the Major Causes of Birth Defects?” En-
cyclopedia of Common Diseases (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Ro-
dale, 1976), p. 176.

33. Victor A. McKusick, Mendelian Inheritance in Man:

164

Catalogs of Autosomal Dominant, Autosomal Recessive, and
X-linked Phenotypes, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1975).

34. Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate (New York:
New American Library, 1959), p. 266.

35. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, The Genetics
of Human Populations (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman,
197 PAP. Ors

36. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Francisco J. Ayala, G.
Ledyard Stebbins, and James W. Valentine, Evolution
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), p. 71.

37. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), s.v. “Ge-
netics, Human.”

38. Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, 22 August
LOT Oompa lee

39. B. Childs, S§. M. Miller, A. G. Bearn, in Mutagenic
Effects of Environmental Contaminants, H. E. Sutton and
M. I. Harris, eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1972),
PP. 3-14.

40. J. W. Drake, The Molecular Basis of Mutation (San
Francisco: Holden Day, 1970).

41. John W. Drake et a/. for Council of the Environ-
mental Mutagen Society, “Environmental Mutagenic
Hazards,” Science, 14 February 1975, p. 503.

42. Peter F. Infante, Joseph K. Wagoner, Anthony J.
McMichael, Richard J. Waxweiler, and Henry Falk, “Ge-
netic Risks of Vinyl Chloride,” Lancet, 3 April 1976, pp.
734-735-

43. Ellis N. Cohen et a/., “Occupational Disease among
Operating Room Personnel,” Anesthesiology, vol. 41, no.
4 (1974), pp. 321-340.

44. Gina Bari Kolata, “Behavioral Teratology: Birth
Defects of the Mind,” Sczence, 17 November 1978, pp.
732-734.

45. Hermann J. Muller, “The Guidance of Human
Evolution,” The Evolution of Man, vol. 2 of Evolution After
Darwin, Sol Tax, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960), p. 436.

46. A. J. Wyrobek and W. R. Bruce, Proc. Natl. Acad.
Sct. USA, vol. 72 (1975), Pp. 4425.

47. D. Segerback et al., Mutation Res. 49, 71 (1978).
48. Luther J. Carter, “Yearly Report on Carcinogens
Could Be a Potent Weapon in the War on Cancer,” Scz-
ence, 9 February 1979, pp. 525-528.

49. Curt Stern, Principles of Human Genetics, 3rd ed.
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), p. 630.

50. James F. Crow, “Chemical Risk to Future Genera-
tions,” Scientist and Citizen, June-July 1968, p. 113.

51. B. N. Ames, J. McCann, and E. Yamasaki, Mata-
tion Res. 31, 347 (1975).

52. Bruce N. Ames, H. O. Kammen, and Edith Yama-
saki, “Hair Dyes Are Mutagenic: Identification of a Vari-
ety of Mutagenic Ingredients,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sct.
USA, vol. 72, no. 6 (1975), p. 1432.

|
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R. CRUMB

A Short History of America

Here’s the only item in this book

_ that subsequently got made into a

poster—available, incidentally, for

| $5.50 postpaid from Last Gasp

Press, 2180 Bryant Street, San Fran-

cisco, CA 94110. (Biogeographical

Provinces on pp. 70-71 doesn’t

| count—it was created as a poster and
_ article simultaneously.) Like Dan O’-
| Neill, Robert Crumb did regular

cartooning for CQ, with four pages in
every CQ between ’76 and ’81. His
CQ work is probably less well known
than his underground cartooning,

_ which began in the early 60s (obliga-

tory litany here: Fritz the Cat, Zap
Comics, Mr. Natural, Joey Tissue
and the Dummies, etc. etc.) and

| continues today in a magazine also

published by Last Gasp called
Weirdo. This cartoon ran as part of
the special guest-edited “Oceans Is-
sue” in Fall 1979—you figure out
the thematic connection. Probably
they couldn’t bear to leave it out of
the magazine.

—Art Kleiner

165

R. Crumb

A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICA~~

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MARY CATHERINE
BATESON

Six Days of
Dying

Catherine Bateson, the only child

of Gregory Bateson and Margaret
Mead, is an anthropologist presently
at Amherst College, Massachusetts.
In Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecol-
ogy of Mind (Ballantine, 1975) there
is a collection of “‘metalogues,’’ semi-
fictional conversations between fa-
ther and daughter inspired by real
dialogues they had when Catherine
was a child. Some other family mem-
bers present in this account (origi-
nally published in the Winter 1980
CQ) are: Gregory’s wife Lois, whom
he met while working on his Double
Bind theory of schizophrenia and
creativity at the VA Hospital in Palo
Alto, California during the 1950s;
Nora, Lois and Gregory’s daughter,
now seventeen; John, Gregory’s son
by his second marriage; and Eric,
Lois’ son by a prior marriage. In ad-
dition to Catherine’s own considera-
ble work, she has collaborated fre-
quently with her father; a list of
Gregory’s collaborations is included
in the introduction to the interview
with Catherine’s parents, “For God’s

170

Sake, Margaret,” on page 26 of this
book. She is also literary executor for
both her father and Margaret Mead.
It is clear the metalogue never
stopped.

Stewart Brand

Just as the intimacies of childbirth and early
mothering have gradually been restored, first
with natural childbirth and rooming in and
most recently with childbirth in the home, so
there is a growing effort to meet death more
intimately and simply. The logical end of this
development is that people die at home or in
an environment as close to home as possible.
The depressions which used to afflict mothers
after childbirth are probably related to inter-
ruptions in the early intimacy between mother
and child which plays a biological role in the
establishment of parental love and care. Simi-
larly, the shadows of guilt and anger which so
often complicate grief may also be related to
interruptions in the process of caring, and they
may be lightened by the experience of tending
someone we love with our own hands, so that
much that seems externally repellent and pain-
ful is transmuted by tenderness.

Death is surely more variable than birth.
Where experiences are difficult to predict or
compare, the specific is more useful than vague
generalization. This is an account of the period
from the second to the seventh of July of 1980,
the period in which I experienced the death of
my father, Gregory Bateson. I can only de-
scribe events as I perceived them; other mem-
bers of the family or close friends may find my
perceptions bizarrely at odds with their own.
Nevertheless, I think all of us agreed that the
fact that we were with my father at the guest-

Stewart Brand

Six Days of Dying

house of San Francisco Zen Center, where he
spent his last days and was laid out after death,
gave us the privilege of a rare and blessed par-
ticipation. We felt that we gained a new un-
derstanding of some of the things that my fa-
ther taught, and also of the teachings of Zen
Buddhism. Trying to make experience explicit
in words is not typical of Zen, but it was some-
thing my father cared about. Lois Bateson, his
wife, commented that Gregory had been a
teacher all his life and that he continued to
teach in the manner of his death. The privilege
we experienced can only partly be shared. Still,
the attempt at description may be helpful, for
it is at moments of birth and death that it is
easy to become timid and to be cowed into an
acceptance of standard institutional forms.

My father’s final illness began in midspring
and I came to California to be near him in
June, arriving one day before he was hospital-
ized. While he was in the hospital I had to be
away for about a week, to keep a previous com-

mitment, and I returned to San Francisco on
July 2 to find that he was out of the hospital
and being cared for at Zen Center, where I too
went to stay. Two days before I had left, we
had been talking, with some sense of realism,
about where he might be able to convalesce,
but even as I departed that had come to seem
unrealistic. Lois felt the gradual change in the
quality of the nurses’ care as, with implicit
triage, they shifted from the effort of healing
to courtesy to the dying. Towards the end of
the week, Lois made the decision to discon-
tinue intravenous feeding—he was eating and
drinking a little, and was receiving no medica-
tion through the I. V.—and then to bring him
to Zen Center and nurse him there, knowing
that he would probably die there.

Gregory had entered the hospital June 10
because of a respiratory crisis that proved to be
pneumonia and an unexplained pain in his
side. Everyone assumed that the pain was re-
lated to the lung cancer he had had in 1978,

In 1978 Gregory nearly died of lung cancer. Part of his recovery was Catherine traveling from Iran to help
with his book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.

E71

Mary Catherine Bateson

which was expected to be terminal and then
went into remission. He himself felt that the
pain might be a local nervous disorder related
to his earlier surgery, and went back to a term
used by his old friend the neurophysiologist
and systems theorist, Warren McCulloch, who
had described how a group of nerves, regener-
ating after surgery, might get into a self-rein-
forcing cycle of resonating pain, but McCul-
loch’s term, causalgia, proved to be unaccepta-
ble in current parlance and was treated as fan-
tasy in the context of the cancer. The pain had
driven him to his bed in late May where pneu-
monia had followed in lungs long handicapped
by emphysema and the cancer episode. He had
been living at Esalen Institute in Big Sur since
the cancer, and friends there came and went
with counsels spun from different epistemolo-
gies, the multiple holisms of an unfocused new
age. He had dutifully done a session of imag-
ing and was told that perhaps indeed he did
not want to live. He had by his bedside an ar-
ray of megadoses of various vitamins and mi-
crodoses of homeopathic medicines, wheat
grass juice available in any quantities he would
accept it, and at the same time he was told that
he was too preoccupied with the physical and
should be concerned with the spiritual, this
being available in various traditional and syn-
cretic forms.

When we left Esalen, heading for San Fran-
cisco ina VW van with a supply of emergency
oxygen, we had two possible destinations,
either University of California Hospital or Zen
Center. I do not believe Gregory was making a
choice between “‘holistic” and “establishment”
medicine, but a choice between multiplicity
and integrity. He maintained a profound skep-
ticism towards both the premises of the medi-
cal profession and the Buddhist epistemology,
but certainty is scarce and there is a kind of re-
lief to be found in a system that expresses the
disciplined working-out of a set of premises,
whatever these may be. Furthermore, he
wanted to be in a place where he could have
more information about what was happening
and where his own curiosity would be allowed
to play a role, his own vitality nurtured by
knowledge rather than by hope.

172

Nora, Gregory, Lois

When we arrived at UC Hospital and got
the diagnosis of pneumonia, everyone con-
curred that pneumonia was something that es-
tablishment medicine knew how to handle and
that it made sense to stay there. Gregory was
deeply tired and in need of an impersonal,
matter-of-fact environment, and for several
days he wanted few visitors and as much new
information about his condition as nonintru-
sive diagnostic procedures would provide. X-
rays showed no growth or spread of cancer and
provided no explanation for the pain. At that
point, after working carefully on the details of
a will, Gregory and his doctor decided that re-
lief from pain was what he needed most, and
he had several days of relatively frequent and
large doses of morphine. When Lois demanded
a recess in which he could be fully conscious
and able to discuss other treatment possibili-
ties after these days, he remained somewhat

pursg 14045

|
|

Six Days of Dying

blurred and disoriented and the pain was a dull
ache rather than an agonizing burning sensa-
tion. He was terribly weakened, partly by
vomiting caused by some of his medication.
He spoke of going home and came lurching
out of the bed in the middle of the night, ask-
ing for scissors to cut the I. V. and oxygen
tubes. Much of his talk was metaphorical and
so discounted by nurses who made cheerful and
soothing noises, but he remained very much
himself, relating in clearly different ways to
different people, compliant but skeptical. Our
initial optimism in this period was a response
to the decrease in pain and the improvement in
pneumonia, but it was premised on a recovery
of strength and will to live which did not
occur.

During the last week in the hospital, there
was a recurrence of the pneumonia, necessitat-
ing another round of antibiotics, and finally
an explanation of the pain, when an eruption
around his side provided the identification of
Herpes zoster (shingles). This form of herpes is a
virus which attacks the nervous system, caus-
ing acute unilateral pain, especially in the el-
derly, and eventually a skin eruption. It is al-
most impossible to diagnose before the rash,
and in Gregory’s case the location of the pain
on one side of his body was all too easy to con-
nect with the cancer. No one dies of shingles,
but the pain may continue indefinitely; it does
seem reasonable to say that Gregory died by
withdrawals from unexplained pain, and that
the explanation came too late to save him.

The six days of the title are the three days
from my return to the moment when his
breathing ceased, approximately at noon on
July 4, followed by the three days until his
cremation. Thus, not all of the punctuation
comes from the natural process of death, but it
serves to frame a period instead of focusing on
a single moment. During those six days we
were at San Francisco Zen Center, with most of
the family and a few close friends sharing in
the nursing and the Zen community providing
practical help and a context of coherent
tranquility.

On the morning of July 2, Gregory asked
his son to kill him. The asking was not a fully

conscious request for practical steps—he sug-
gested getting a stick and hitting him over the
head with it, as if by brutal overstatement to
achieve the opposite of euphemism—but it
was a demanding paternal honesty. When I ar-
rived, Lois suggested that John and her son,
Eric, and I meet with Michael, Gregory’s
friend and physician, hoping that we could ac-
cept as a group what she had already accepted
in the decision to leave the hospital. Michael
talked about the fact that there were various
aggressive forms of treatment that could be
taken to keep Gregory alive, and about his
sense, having observed Gregory during the ear-
lier crisis and in the intervening period, that
Gregory had been turning toward death and
that such interventions would be inappropriate
and ultimately futile. All of us felt that men-
tally at least Gregory’s withdrawal was proba-
bly irreversible, whatever the mechanism in-
volved, and that his wishes should be respected
as far as they could be. What this meant was
giving up the pressure on him to suffer those
things that might prolong his life—sitting up
for a few minutes, respiratory therapy or an ox-
ygen tube at his nostrils, another spoonful of
custard, another sip of broth—while making
each of these available if in any way he seemed
to want them, or doing anything else we could
to make him more comfortable. The more
deeply one rejects the separation of mind and
body, the more difficult it is to treat the pro-
cesses of disease and death as mechanical and
alien to the self. Even as one gives up the im-
age of an external enemy, of death personified
as the Grim Reaper or reified in the name of a
killing disease, the problem which lives in
most people’s unconscious becomes conscious,
the feeling that the death of those we love is a
betrayal. We tend to feel that someone who is
dying has an implicit obligation to stay alive:
to accept treatment, to make an unflagging ef-
fort, and indeed to think thoughts that would
support the effort at life rather than the drift
toward death, not because to do so is comfort-
ing but because it may be a real factor in what
happens.

We went back into the room where a hospi-
tal bed had been brought for Gregory, and we

173

Mary Catherine Bateson

shared some sherry and stilton cheese. Gregory
accepted a mouthful of each. We sat in a half-
circle open towards the bed, and a student and
friend of Gregory’s, Steve, played the violin,
while Lois accompanied him with chords on
the tambur and those who could harmonized
their voices, weaving a wandering chant in the
darkening room for what seemed a very long
time. During the music Gregory, half dozing,
brushed the tube that was supplying oxygen
away from his nostrils, and each of us, I sup-
pose, struggled with the impulse to get up and
replace it. Some of us were crying quietly. The
music was gentle mourning, uniting the var-
ious terms to which each of us had come in the
acceptance of his death into a single covenant.
When the music ended we sat for a while, lis-
tening to his labored, drowning breathing.
After a time, lights were lit, Gregory stirred
himself to eat and drink a little more, a few
mouthfuls, the night watches were shared out,
and one of the Zen students entering the room
restored the oxygen tube. After that it was put
back or offered several times, but eventually
each time he rejected it.

Within the rhythm of our day, one of a
small group was always with him: Lois, or
Kathleen, a friend and nurse who had come
with the family from Esalen, or I, or John and
Eric, or Robert, the Zen priest who manages
the guest house. Each evening different Zen
students, some of them friends and others un-
named, would come and sit in the room also,
erect and immobile unless they were needed,
for Baker Roshi, in touch every day by tele-
phone from across the country, wanted the stu-
dents to approach the suchness of dying and to
give their quiet support to Gregory and to us.
He instructed them to deepen their empathy
by breathing in unison with Gregory, support-
ing and sharing. Those of us staying in the
house slept at different hours and slipped out
briefly to join the meditations in the Zendo or
to chant or join in the Eucharist at a convent
around the corner. Others came and went. We
felt that for Gregory the process of dying pro-
ceeded gradually but without even a clear dis-
tinction between sleeping and waking.

On July 3 Gregory spoke occasionally, mak-

174

ing gestures of affection and recognition, but
much of what he said was blurred and unintel-
ligible. He also spoke to others he seemed to
see around the bed and once or twice asked
whether a particular person was indeed present
or only a dream. It was often necessary to move
his big ungainly body for he had become al-
most completely incontinent. This more than
anything was reminiscent of the care of an in-
fant, but moving him to clean or change pads
or to guard against bed sores became especially
difficult on that day because although he was
not able to help at all, there was a sort of recal-
citrance in his body against these indignities.
He gave an impression of deep concentration.
Jerry Brown came in on the evening of
the third and Gregory recognized him and
stretched out his hand to greet him, calling
him by name. As Jerry left and we settled
down for the night, Gregory’s labored breath-
ing had slowed to the point where sometimes
the interval between breaths left room for a
momentary doubt of whether another breath
would follow. We shared the certainty that less
than a day remained. Gregory was dying as
people die in books, gradually sinking towards
death in a self-reinforcing process. Intravenous
feeding and continous oxygen could drag that
process out, interfering with the choice of
mind and body not to sustain life, and another
counter-attack might have been possible on the
pneumonia which we could hear in Gregory’s
breathing. But pneumonia has long been
called the “old man’s friend.” I never thought
of my father as an old man until he was dying.
During the late night and the morning
hours of the Fourth of July, each of us had time
alone with him. He still smiled and responded
to a handclasp, or would draw a hand to his
lips. Touching seemed important, and the hos-
pital bed enforced an isolation that had to be
bridged. I found I wanted to give him the
sound of a voice, so I read aloud the final chap-
ters of the Book of Job. I held up a flower from
one of the vases, not as something sweet and
pretty but as a symbol of the order of truth to
which he had been most true, the grace and in-
tricacy of mental phenomena underlying the
patterns of the biological world, and wondered

Six Days of Dying

whether a flower could still evoke that alle-
giance as, for someone else, a lifted cross could
evoke a whole life lived in the Christian con-
text. He would have been able to call the flower

_ by name.

By mid-morning he was unable to drink,

and we put tiny amounts of water in his dry
- mouth to give some moisture, afraid that he

would choke on any more, unable to swallow.

_ His breathing was laborious and slow. Lois no-
_ticed a pattern of blotches on his chest which

at first we thought was a further eruption of
_ the Herpes and then realized was a result of a

_ change in circulation.

A short time later, Roger, a friend from
Esalen, saw the pupils of his eyes dilate as his
mind encountered the dark. So we gathered
around the bed, some six of us who had been
caring for him most closely, hardly breathing

_ ourselves as we waited from breath to breath,

the time stretching, the time stretching be-
yond the possible, and yet again and again fol-
lowed by a gasping reflexive inhalation, and
then again the lengthening pause. I kept pray-
ing that he would be free from each next com-

_ pulsive effort, let go, rest, and when after a

time no further breath followed, we still stood,
slowly relaxing with the faintest sighs, barely
able to return to a flow of time not shaped by
that breathing. Lois reached forward, after her
office, and gently closed his eyes.

We did not at that time pause to mourn but

_ slowly found our way into the expression of
_ continuing care. After Lois, in my turn, I

reached out and began to straighten his arms,
then folding his hands. Someone lowered the
bed to the flat and dropped the sides. I thought
briefly of those cultures in which the bodies of
loved ones are transmuted at the moment of
death into something impure, polluting those
who touch them. During my lifetime few
Americans have tended their dead, just as few
have tended their dying, and we had to grope
our way, following clues from other times or
other cultures. For Lois the available model
was the Balinese one, in which the bodies of
men are washed by men, and those of women
by women, but for me the model was the
Western one where women have received the

newly born and the newly dead into their care.
In the end we all worked together, removing
the soiled pads, cleaning away the final traces
of excrement, lifting and turning and washing
each limb, shifting from side to side this be-
loved body from which all tension and recal-
citrance were drained so that he suffered our
care with a curious innocence. The blotches on
his skin had faded.

Roshi had instructed that all traces of the
sick room be removed, and Gregory was lifted
and carried to the double bed at the other side
of the room, dressed in a bathrobe and covered
with the sheet and spread. He was still a little
too long for any bed. With half a dozen Zen
folk joining in, the hospital bed and table were
dismantled and carried out, the linens and the
clothes and basin we had used to wash him
were removed. Consulting each other in muted
voices, we bound a kerchief around his chin,
experimenting with the angle until we were
able to close his mouth, collecting and com-
posing ourselves even as Gregory’s body and
the room were made serene in composure. As
the work was completed, Robert surveyed the
scene and then went and straightened the folds
of the bed cover so they fell in sculptured order
to the floor. Then he set up a small altar, a ta-
ble with an incense burner at the foot of the
bed, and said that now he would show us how
to offer incense to Gregory: bow (the bow
whose name is “‘asking’’), touch a few grains of
incense to the third eye in the center of the
forehead, place them on the burning charcoal,
add a few more grains, bow. It seemed to me
well to perform an act which was both alien
and completely formal, combining affection
and courtesy with total estrangement. From
that time, incense burned constantly in the
room, and two or more of the Zen folk sat and
watched. Gregory was not a Buddhist, but Zen
mindfulness and decorum were for him an af-
firmation of the intricate order of mind. We
sat for awhile, and soon I went and slept in an-
other room of the guest house.

When I woke up and returned to my father’s
bedside it was late afternoon. His body was
cold now when I touched his hands, and the
tracery of red blood vessels in his cheeks

175

Mary Catherine Bateson

At the Zen Center funeral on July 20, family members and any of the 200 other mourners present were
invited to speak to Gregory. A lively conversation resulted, sometimes funny, sometimes quite moving,

always warm and personal and a release. Here Catherine says her piece. Left to right: Lois, Nora, Cather-
ine, Eric.

drained of color. Someone had removed the
kerchief and combed his hair. As his body had
settled gradually into the rigor of death, his
face assumed a gentle, just slightly mischie-
vous smile, and with the wisdom of mothers
who refuse to believe that their infants’ first
smiles are caused by gas, we felt we could rec-
ognize the carrying over of irony into peace. As
he had weakened and had been able to express
less and less, the final attribute distilled from
the others was sweetness, so this was the natu-
ral form into which his features settled, unfal-
sified by cosmetics and the skillful artifices of
morticians who teach the dead to lie to the liv-
ing about what they meet at journey’s end.
Downstairs we drank sherry and ate the stil-
ton cheese that Gregory loved with other
members of the immediate circle who had not
been present at noon, in undefined shared sac-
rament. Through the next two nights and
days, a new pattern developed an echo of the

176

rhythm of Gregory’s last days. The Zen stu-
dents came and went, keeping their vigil, and
we also took turns being by Gregory’s side,
watching the continuing changes as death in-
creasingly and more deeply asserted itself. The
window was kept open to the cool San Fran-
cisco weather, and in the morning he seemed
to me a thousand miles more distant, his skin
pale as wax, his hand still and very cold. Asa
child I believed that the dead became such
strangers immediately, not realizing that there
is a maturation in death. Having offered in-
cense once, I found I preferred to enter the
room informally and sit close by his side,
touching his hand in greeting and farewell.

Our Buddhist guides told of their belief
that the soul lingers near the body for up to
three days before it finally departs, so that cre-
mation should not occur for three days and the
body should be attended, especially during the
first two days, and they encouraged us and

PUOLY 14ONAS

Six Days of Dying

other visitors to read out loud or to address
Gregory. At the same time, all of us had lim-
ited experience and we were shy of the physical

complications of keeping a body for too long a

period of time, so the decision was made to

_ send the body to the crematorium on the sixth.
_ That morning the Zen students withdrew,

_ leaving the watch with Gregory to the family.

_ My sister Nora and I went in together, sitting

for a time on either side of the big bed as she

_ explored the quality of death, feeling his

hands, asking about the mechanism of rigor,
wondering at the absence of the familiar bulk.
Reb, one of the Zen teachers, spoke of him as
being like a beached whale, but at the end he
was strangely diminished. Then the Neptune
Society van came, and Gregory was wrapped in
a sheet that someone had carefully ironed that
morning, strapped to a stretcher, and finally

his face was covered with a dark green wrapper.

The Zen Guest House is an old and gracious
building, with stairs wide enough for one to
make a final departure on a stretcher or in a
coffin, and probably Gregory was not the first
person to leave it so.

Baker Roshi’s advice was to stay as close to
the process as possible, following Gregory step

_ by step through the concrete reality, so on the

seventh the family went to the crematorium

| with a small group of Zen monks who had also

been close to Gregory. We took various things

to send with him into the fire: a volume of

Blake’s poetry, flowers and sweet smelling
herbs, individual roses. We gave him a small

crab that Eric and John had gone out witha
flashlight to capture the night before, in mem-
ory of the way he had taught each of us to
study tide pools and of the way he had taken a
crab with him year after year to his opening
classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, to
open his students’ eyes to the “fearful symme-
tries” of organic life. Nora brought a bagel be-
cause he had once quipped at Esalen that the
hole in a bagel would be reincarnated in a
doughnut. There were incense and the ashes of
incense from Zen Center.

We went into the backstage of the cremato-
rium where the great ovens are, a disheveled
and unkempt region of noisy machinery. His
body was on a plank on a wheeled stretcher,
and when the covering was turned back we
could see that rigor had passed and his mouth
had fallen open, his head fallen sideways. His
body seemed gray and abandoned as if finally
life had fully receded. We piled our gifts
within the shroud and offered incense, and as
the Zen folk chanted in Sanskrit we each whis-
pered whatever other prayers we felt the mo-
ment needed. Reb, the Zen priest officiating,
whispered in his ear before the oven door was
closed. None of us felt any longer the need or
desire to touch him.

Reb showed Lois the button to press to start
the oven, as in another age she would have set
the flame to a pyre of fragrant woods. And
then he suggested that we go outside to where
the smoke of the crematorium was escaping
into the bright sky.

177

BRYCE AND
MARGARET MUIR

“Where’ve

You Been,
otranger ?”
Disintermediation
in the

Maritimes

OK, reader, first you need to know
what disintermediation is. Here’s
the textbook definition quoted from
Paul Hawken, who made the term
the title of his article in the Spring
1981 CQ: “In economics, disinter-
mediation is used to describe the dis-
placement of funds from banks and
savings institutions when depositors
decide to seek higher yields by in-
vesting on their own, bypassing the
institutions.”’ Paul used the word to
describe a healthy process happening
now in the new “information econ-
omy’’—individuals are abandoning
stagnant economic intermediaries
like banks, corporations, and spe-
cialized professionals, in favor of a

178

more locally sufficient work ethic—
gardens, the underground economy,
industries with smaller and steadier
growth, people living off their skills.

We didn’t print Paul’s essay here
because he reworked it into a book,
The Next Economy (Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1982); but this response to
that essay, published Summer 1981,
is wonderful and illuminating in its
own right. The Muirs wrote several
essays for CQ, each taking a theory
(disintermediation, local politics)
and testing the practice of it in the
unflappable experimental laboratory
of their New England maritime lives
and town. Peggy is an anthropolo-
gist; Bryce is a toymaker.

Art Kleiner

The “subterranean economy” has gotten a lot
of press recently, as if barter, or discount cash
business, were some wonderful new invention.
Less affluent Americans have always used these
strategies, of course. It’s only when their mid-
dle-class cousins discover invisible income that
it becomes news. Leave it to the middle class to
rediscover the obvious.

Now Paul Hawken has put a new catchword
on the tips of our tongues: disintermediation.
In business, it used to be called cutting out the
middleman, and it’s still an excellent cure for
shrinking profits. The American middle class
may now be discovering that disintermediation
also heals an aching wound in the family
pocketbook.

One form of disintermediation is increas-
ingly popular: networking. The 80s are the
decade of the personal network. The happy

“Where’ve You Been, Stranger?”

coincidence of a contracting economy and an
information revolution makes this inevitable.
Exchanging goods, services, and information
through extended personal networks, we can
dispense with middlemen and stretch our
dollars.
_ To read COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY you
might think that networking is a brave new
world. Disintermediation by personal network
is, in fact, as old as islands. Hawken points out
that middlemen proliferate where there is con-
tinuous economic growth. In places where cash
flows are sluggish, or seasonal, middlemen
_ don’t predominate, and personal economic
networks are a way of life. This is the case in
the maritime hinterlands of Maine and Atlan-
_ tic Canada.
| In traditional maritime society every man
is a jack of all trades, able to cut his own fire-
wood, build a house and boat, make and mend
"fishing gear, fish and hunt, keep animals for
meat and dairy products, do his own boat and
auto mechanics, plumb and wire. Ina pinch he
can do a little smithing in the parlor stove,
" some rough doctoring offshore, and put down a
_ wellpoint by hand. Each maritime woman is a
_ respected master at the arts of child rearing
_and housekeeping. Raising, gathering, and
_ preserving; making and mending clothing;
fi and keeping the social gears greased are all in
_ her day’s work. These traditional skills enable
" disintermediation i in spades.
i _ When cash is abundant, maritimers may
' hire out some or all of the subsistence chores:
[ buy California lettuce, take the car to a garage,
P send away for a new dress. So long as cash
' work, or good fishing, produces surplus in-
i come, beyond present needs and subsistence
| maintenance for the off season, specializations
proliferate. When the fish are running, there's
lots of work for carpenters. When the catch is
{ ‘off, I can pound my own nails, thank you.
_ The uncertainties, and seasonality, of mari-
time cash flow mean that no specialist can de-
_ pend on continuous employment. Carpenters
cut pulp in the winter. A grocer may own a
truck for hauling gravel. Anthropologists call
| this diversified pattern of employment “‘sea-
sonal pluralism,” and it is an appropriate adap-

a

tation to the ebb and flow of a resource-based
economy.

Seasonal pluralism makes maritimers sensi-
tive to any opportunity for disintermediation.
Consider the fish business. When I can go out
and catch 10,000 pounds of groundfish a day,
all I want to do is come in, dump those babies
on the dock, gas up, and get back at them. I’m
willing to take a lower price from a middle-
man, so long as I can land big volumes, and he
can worry about the market. But, when the
best I can do is bring in 50 pounds of lobster
for a day’s haul, I might be tempted to float
those lobsters in crates until I have a truckload,
and personally deliver them to a restaurant
owner in Ohio—for a big cash price. (IRS
doesn’t like that one bit. Government bureau-
crats are the ultimate intermediators. They
stand between us, as taxpayers, and ourselves,
as consumers of government services. Bypass-
ing the taxman is the lowest form of
disintermediation.)

Even in the best of times maritimers will
tend to buy winter staples in bulk, in season.
While the fish are running, fishermen will salt
away enough cash to cover winter subsistence
before they indulge in consumerism. Affluence
is just another run of luck which has to end.
Maritimers are prepared for an age of economic
uncertainty. A healthy distrust of affluence and
a full set of traditional skills stand them in
good stead. They also have fine-tuned another
necessary skill for disintermediation: network
communications.

While every maritimer is a jack of all trades,
any given man may excel at one trade or an-
other. If you have a gift for engine mechanics, I
may prefer your work to mine—so long as we
can come to some arrangement. Maybe you’d
like some of the special cheese my wife makes.
Not only is the distribution of special aptitude
uneven, so is the availability of capital equip-
ment. Unlike the suburbs, where every house
may have a lawn tractor, perhaps only one man
ina fishing village has a tractor, or a set of
torches, or a torque wrench. Matching indi-
vidual needs with local skills and appropriate
tools requires information.

Getting and maintaining access to economic

179

Bryce and Margaret Muir

information is a constant pursuit in the mari-
times. Much of what passes for nosiness is just
keeping track of economic activity and capital
equipment. I watch my neighbor’s tractor in
the spring. When he hooks up the rototiller I
know he’s stopped skidding pulpwood for the
year and is ready to plow gardens. That’s the
time to make a deal to bust up my new potato
patch—not before. Any maritimer can tell you
the optimum moment to access someone’s eco-
nomic skills, and where every major tool in
town is at that instant—or he knows who

to ask.

Maritime men and women spend a consider-
able portion of each day maintaining personal
networks—in no small part to have continuous
access to economic information. Usually
founded on kinship, a personal network will
tend to encompass all those persons whose
skills and material resources are necessary for
one’s subsistence. Maritimers also frequent
those places generally known as information
exchanges. Restaurants in coastal Maine are
often the place where men drink coffee and
keep up on what’s going on. A boatbuilder’s
shop or the manager’s office on a wharf may be
the local information brokerage house.

The key to continuous access is constant at-
tention. Maritime men are expected to contact
each member of their active network every day,
face-to-face. If you don’t make the rounds for
a couple of days, you will be greeted with,
‘“Where’ve you been, stranger?” Maritime
women chat around their active nets numerous
times each day, via phone. These channel
checks, or continuity tests, assure that news
circulates rapidly, and they identify an individ-
ual as a dependable member of the network.
You are always logged in.

Once logged in you may have to fulfill net-
work obligations at a moment’s notice. If you
have a labor exchange understanding with your
brother-in-law, and you see him hauling his
boat, you'll stop and lend a hand. Summer vis-
itors to the maritimes always seem astounded
that a man will promise to doa job and then
not show up for weeks. Summer people don’t
understand that a maritimer is juggling a raft
of obligations, many of them dependent on

180

chance of the weather and the pattern of activ-
ity in his network—all unpredictable. If a
maritimer promises to do a job, he will, but
when is a matter of circumstances. You don’t
“make a date” with a maritimer. This unsched-
uled sort of disintermediation doesn’t suit an
industrial environment.

Industrial wage work, or any sort of regular
hours, tends to disconnect you from local eco-
nomic networks—which is only fair. You
won't be in the restaurant on windy days, or on
the phone while the baby naps. Professional
women in the maritimes find this particularly
destructive, because network breakdown dis-
rupts their female solidarity as well as their
economic access.

The point for middle-class Americans who
might turn to disintermediative networks in
the face of economic adversity is that personal
network maintenance is extraordinarily time-
consuming. Total access to local disinterme-
diative goods, services, or information takes
a total commitment. You can’t just plug in
when you want access. Disintermediative net-
works in the larger society often suffer from the
same complaint: a bad signal-to-noise ratio.
Computer data banks can spew out reams of
information before you find the bit you want.
Just so, you’ll suffer through hours of small
talk at the restaurant before that one vital bit
of information comes along. Time may be the
price we pay for networking.

Let’s follow a maritime search routine to see
what it entails. Say we are looking for a work
crew to move a building, and our local eco-
nomic relations are all in order. We'll wait fora
blowy day when all the fishermen are ashore.
First we activate our close network, letting
them know what we are planning. We'll go to
the restaurant early in the morning and let it
be known, casually, that we plan to move a
building at such a time and are in the market
for labor. Shortly before the stated hour we'll
go to the beer store, buy a few cases, and an-
nounce the job. As if by magic, a crew will
materialize. After the job is done (and the
beer), we'll offer to pay the labor at the univer-
sal local rate (say $5 an hour). Some may accept
payment. Most will refuse, citing a previous

“Where’ve You Been, Stranger?”

_ debt to us, or suggesting an alternative pay-

ment in kind.

“Maybe I can use your house jacks some-
time,” or “I’ll probably need your help
sometime.” ;

You can see why access takes attention. That
last crew member, who expects to use our labor
sometime, assumes we'll know when, because
we are regular players in the game. Similarly,
automated barter networks will only be gener-
ally useful if there is a variety of necessary
goods and services always available locally via
the net. Otherwise they will merely be an eco-
nomic sideshow.

Personal economic networks have political
implications. The ripoff artist is quickly ostra-
cized. If you don’t play fair, you don’t play
long. This not only includes providing quality
goods and services, it means adhering to the
local wage level. My time is no less valuable
than yours, doc. You can allow for amortizing
capital equipment, but everyone paid for his
education—don’t be putting on airs.

Once integrated into a local exchange sys-
tem, you realize that every good and service
has a recognized fair value. Everyone knows
how long it takes to time an engine. Everyone
is keeping score. I know you owe me fifteen
minutes of sweat and a bale of hay. Everyone’s
goal is “balanced reciprocity’’—tit for tat.
This has the advantage of making us all eco-
nomic equals, and the disadvantage of reduc-
ing us all to the lowest common denominator.
Those who wish to break out of equalized sub-
sistence must go out into the larger economy
for cash income, and forfeit access to the ex-
change network. Outsiders pay top dollar for
local goods and services.

The prevailing economic assumption in the
maritime culture is the idea of “limited good”:
there is only so much resource to go around.
Every fish you catch is one less for me, so we
better share more or less equally. A rough jus-
tice prevails in fishing communities. Economic
advancement (getting ahead) while your
neighbors only get by, makes you a target of
jealousy. Too much conspicuous consumption
is antisocial, and the local teenagers may trash
your property some dark night. Don’t be

greedy. Set out 1,000 lobster traps in an area
where most men fish 500 and you'll lose a lot
of traps. By the same token, if your luck is bad
this season, and I’ve been doing all right, I
might give you a hint where to set some gear,
lest you call me greedy.

The idea of limited good has been dismissed
as a shortsighted local view, suitable for peas-
ants, perhaps, but not applicable to industrial
civilization and economies of scale. Only re-
cently have the limits to growth become a
topic of discussion in the larger society. The
economic egalitarianism of the maritimes may
become a more popular social adaptation as we
approach the limits to resource development.

The intrusion of outside capital and the ac-
celeration of technological innovation have dis-
rupted the maritime homeostat. Fishing com-
munities, local resources, and environmental
conditions traditionally composed a dynamic
steady-state system. The limited marine re-
sources were treated as common property. If
one man took too much, it was at the expense
of all, and he was castigated. Fish and men
survived together in rough harmony. The pro-
cess of modernizing maritime society is hardly
complete, and the old values endure below the
surface. Maritimers may have to depend on
their traditional common sense during the next
decade.

Another political aspect of maritime culture
has implications for wider disintermediation
by networks. Every man is taken at face value
in the maritimes. Each maritimer speaks for
himself, out of his personal knowledge. It is
recognized that each view of the world is dif-
ferent, and no one local view has higher au-
thority. Anyone presuming to a position of
leadership is accused of being big-headed.
Anyone presuming to have the last word ona
local subject is laughed out of court.

This is not how information is treated in
American society at large. We have experts and
specialists whose opinions have authority.
Scholastic knowledge is hierarchical. This
stands to reason. When we are building towers
of abstraction, we must agree on the founda-
tions—call something “truth.” An orderly hi-
erarchy of abstractions is fine, if we are con-

181

Bryce and Margaret Muir

structing academic models. Adhering to a
generalized “truth” can be dangerous in real
life. Concrete local knowledge too often con-
tradicts a lovely abstraction. Network commu-
nications must be egalitarian lest they lose
touch with local realities. Arbitrarily rejecting
local knowledge in favor of the conventional
wisdom has made the mass media a sorry vehi-
cle for the transmission of useful and accurate
information. Part of the success of the Whole
Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly is that
all submitted information is treated as equally
valid. This is open networking—the only way
to guarantee the free flow of information.

Maritimers are generally open-minded
about new information. When my truck ex-
hibits mysterious symptoms, I will certainly
put more faith in the opinion of a gifted me-
chanic I know than in the casual advice of some
stranger. But I'll listen to the stranger’s advice
and put it on file. If he is a maritimer, it is
probably based on experience—not just gas.
An egalitarian attitude toward information
keeps maritime networks open to the smallest
economic opportunity. Fishermen are consid-
ered extremely conservative, in the conven-
tional wisdom. Actually they are quick to seize
the least advantage. Let it be rumored that you
have a market for barnacles, and your phone
will ring off the wall.

It is worth noting that maritime networks,
for all their egalitarianism, are not based on

182

friendship. Friendship implies an emotional
relationship which supersedes economic advan-
tage. You’d give a friend the shirt off your
back. That makes a friend an economic liabil-
ity. Middle-class Americans can afford the lux-
ury of friendship. In a world of limited good
it’s every man for himself. A friend might ask
where the good fishing is. Maritime networks
don’t rely on trust, or the emotional bonds of
friendship, for their durability. They depend
on that old individualistic motive: mutual
self-interest.

By contrast, disintermediative networks in
the larger society are often animated by a cer-
tain emotionalism. Old boy networks are col-
ored with the aura of schoolboy camaraderie.
Countercultural nets assume a common ideal-
ism. Co-ops are supposed to be warm and
friendly before they are businesslike.

Friendship can be a fine foundation for eco-
nomic networking. It provides an egalitarian
attitude toward shared information, and a pre-
disposition for fair dealing. Friendship nets
generally lack the diversity to be widely utili-
tarian, however, and network interactions get
clouded with emotional expectations. The be-
havior of traditional economic networks in the
maritimes indicates that unswerving practical-
ity may be the best way to share limited re-
sources equally, through personal networks.

Which reminds me, any of you have a good
market for barnacles?

Married female, age 38
I can’t bear the pain any longer.
I’m tired, discouraged and unhappy.

ART KLEINER

How Not to
Commit Suicide

From the original introduction

(Summer 1981):

This article arose from a conversation
among the directors of our founda-
tion, Point. Michael Phillips and I
wanted to publish information on
how to commit suicide. Hiding such
information is a vicious taboo, we
opined in high libertarian dudgeon.
Richard Baker, abbot of the local
Zen Center and one who sees a lot of
disturbed people, remarked drily, “If
the information were generally avail-
able, a fellow I talked with last week
would be dead now. He wouldn’t do
it this week I think. The information

_ that people need is how not to com-

mit suicide. They think if they take
an overdose of sleeping pills they'll
just go to sleep and never wake up.
Instead they wake up choking on
their vomit, and there’s the emer-
gency room and stomach pumping
and brain damage, and it’s the oppo-
site of relief for their suffering. Peo-
ple try all sorts of things that don’t

_ work, all horrible.”

CQ staffer Art Kleiner got the as-
signment and immersed himself in

it with his customary zeal. (He
wants noted that “four people who
have worked with suicidal people
helped me articulate the article, even
though they weren’t directly quoted
in it—Mary Deems, Ron Jones,
Larry Cohen, and Ben Campbell.’’)
Journalist Kleiner also adds, “This
article was probably the most re-
warding I’ve ever done, nightmares
and all.”

Stewart Brand

During the four years since this arti-
cle was published, I’ve heard from
half-a-dozen people, saying they ora
friend or patient of theirs would not
be alive but for this article; in each
case the person stumbled across the
information herein, thought hard
about their suicide attempt, realized
what they were getting into, and de-
cided to try changing their life
instead.

Art Kleiner

Instead of oblivion and relief, nine out of ten suicide at-
tempters live through various ordeals of intense physical
suffering, stomach pumping, lasting internal injury,
brain damage, bureaucratization, moral condemnation,
uninvited psychiatry . . . and sometimes new attitudes

about life.

Resurrection, the voyage to the land of the
dead and back again, is common enough in old
legends and myths and in the experiences of
people who live through a near-terminal illness
or accident. But that journey is also made daily
in hospital emergency rooms.

183

Art Kleiner

About thirty thousand people kill them-
selves in the United States each year. An esti-
mated ten to forty times that number try to
kill themselves but don’t die, either because
they don’t really want to die or because they
don’t know how.

I didn’t realize the impact of that statistic
until I talked to friends and acquaintances
while researching this article. Everyone I
talked to, whether I interviewed them or casu-
ally brought the subject up, knew someone
who had attempted suicide.

Some of the stories are tragic. A friend of a
friend jumped from a high building and hit a
parked car several stories below. She broke
most of her bones and punctured several of her
inner organs but didn’t die. Instead she was
wheeled, conscious, to the local emergency
room, her most privately conceived act an-
nounced to the world by the ambulance siren.
She spent the next year in bed, much of it ina
hospital ward allocated to critically ill victims
of violence, her still-suicidal mind the only
functioning part of her body.

This article about what happens to people
who attempt to kill themselves started as a
brief review of a pair of new publications
aimed at the terminally ill. One booklet, the
widely-publicized but little-read “death man-
ual,” How to Die With Dignity, contains a chart
of lethal doses of different types of pills and
methods of deliberately ensuring a calm death
in a suicide attempt. It was published by Scot-
tish Exit, a northern spinoff of British Exit,
the London group that has in the past year
sought and won more than its share of contro-
versy. Two of the members of the London
group are now facing trial on nine charges of
aiding people to kill themselves.

The other book, Let Me Die Before I Wake, is
a collection of case histories of people who have
committed suicide or attempted it and failed,
with detailed descriptions of the methods
used. It was published this spring by a Los An-
geles group called Hemlock, which also coun-
sels terminally ill people on their other op-
tions. The book’s author, Derek Humphry, is a
British journalist who wrote the sentimental
memoir Jean’s Way (1978; $5 postpaid from

184

Hemlock, Suite 101, 2803 Ocean Park Boule-
vard, Santa Monica, California 90405), the
first popular book to describe what Hemlock
calls “‘Self-Deliverance.” Humphry’s first wife,
Jean, discovered that she had bone marrow
cancer and took a fatal drug overdose as she was
on the verge of becoming immobile.

“Perhaps ten percent of our members are
terminally ill,’ Humphry told me. “The great
fear of the rest of our members is that they
may face a painful, awful death one day. If they
can say, ‘I have this cache of pills and good ad-
vice on how to use them,’ they can feel pre-
pared if they eventually do fall ill, and in the
meantime can get on with the business of
living.”

So when I went to emergency room physi-
cians, paramedics, and therapists, I expected
to hear of many people who might have needed
this information—people who, faced with a
grim illness and no alternatives to it, had tried
to kill themselves and ended in the emergency
room instead. Wrong. People who plan delib-
erate suicides usually succeed—as Humphry
said, everything in the suicide manuals can
also be found in medical textbooks. People in
emergency rooms are usually people who at-
tempted suicide on impulse, in temporary de-
spair or anger. Many decide later that it was a
mistake.

They are the people whose fate has been
thrown into sharper focus by the existence of
these new books. The argument between Exit
and the British suicide prevention groups
played with much commotion in the press and
in conversation. The books should not be pub-
lished, the suicide prevention people said, be-
cause temporarily distraught people would use
them impulsively and dié, where without
them they would probably live. Yes, said the
voluntary euthanasia groups, but preparing for
a rational, planned suicide as the books en-
courage, and thinking out its ramifications
(like who will be affected by it) makes people
less likely to kill themselves impulsively. Yes,
but the context of the how-to-die information
shows suicide as an easy way to solve problems,
and doesn’t encourage people to look for other
options first.

How Not to Commit Suicide

Yes, but the books are available only
through the mail, with a three-month waiting
period, just to discourage such abuse. Yes, but
with easy Xerox access no one can guarantee
the books won’t find a subterranean following.
Yes, but banning the book is equally manipu-
Jative—it keeps people from the option of
dying easily unless they are lucky enough to
find people who will help them. Yes, but they
might find people who will help them avoid
the pain tomorrow, if they aren’t encouraged to
end their lives today. Yes, but. . .

The debate is fascinating to follow, because
usually talk of suicide is hushed up, for fear it
will create more suicide or someone will be
held responsible. Psychologist David Gruder
worked in a California high school a few years
ago when one of the popular seniors killed
himself. “In the next two weeks everybody
pulled me aside—students, teachers, the prin-
cipal—to ask me what they could have done,
what he meant by it. But nobody said any-
thing out loud to each other. Finally I gave a
talk at the library about suicide and suicide
prevention, and I had to argue with six levels
of school administration to do it. I had to tell
them the clinical truth is that talking about
suicide often neutralizes it. Ignoring it always
paves the way for more attempts.”

When a genuine myth rises into conscious-
ness, Ursula Le Guin wrote in “The Language
of the Night,” the message is always: You must
change your life. Each suicide attempt, I’m con-
vinced, carries that message: to the person who
tries it, to the people who are close to that per-
son, and to the rest of us as a society. I think
what happens after a suicide attempt is a sort of
autopsy of what’s best and worst about our cul-
ture. Here is some of that story.

Like the other two hundred suicide prevention
telephone hotlines in the U.S., the Marin Sui-
cide Prevention Center holds several eleven-
session training classes a year. I sat in on one of
the introductory sessions. It looked like any
suburban adult education class—sixty fidgety
people of all ages in chairs too small for them,
and two instructors, the Center’s Acting Di-
rector Noreen Dunnigan and the Program Di-

rector David Nolan. After a warning that sta-
tistics are misleading, Dunnigan jumped in.

“For every 100,000 people in the United
States,” she said “‘an average of 12.5 attempt
suicide each year. At this center we get 1200
calls a month, from 250 clients. Most people
call more than once. Wednesday is our busiest
day. (“It’s the day most therapists take off,”
Nolan interrupted.) Eighty percent of the peo-
ple call about themselves; the rest are clergy,
friends, family—calling because they’re wor-
ried about someone. The later the hour, the
higher the number of calls. Thirty-four per-
cent of the callers are male, sixty-six percent
female. Can anybody guess why?”

“Men aren’t as used to reaching out for
help,” said a man, the only black person in
the room.

Dunnigan nodded and went on: “Fifty-four
percent of the callers are not in a suicidal cri-
sis. Forty-six percent have problems with alco-
hol or drugs. Thirty-five percent live alone.
Once every fifty hours, in what we call active
intervention, we send someone in—an ambul-
ance or friends, or clergy, or someone else goes
over to their house because we ask them to.”

“What do you mean by suicidal crisis?”
asked a studious-looking woman. “You don’t
mean forty-six percent are actually trying
suicide?”

David Nolan replied. “No, the fifty-four
percent are people who don’t mention suicide
at all. They have some other problem—loneli-
ness, maybe—and they want somebody to talk
to. Twenty-six percent have suicidal ideation.
They’re thinking about it. Thirteen percent are
threatening suicide. Six percent are attempting
it as we talk to them. The rest, we don’t know
about; the calls are too short or we don’t find
out.”

Noreen Dunnigan gave some statistics from
the Marin coroner’s office about people who did
kill themselves. “The highest rate of suicide is
in May. We'll talk more about what happens to
people in the spring. The second highest is in
January, just after the holidays. The older the
person the higher the suicide rate. The average
age for males is forty-one. The average for fe-
males is forty-five.”

185

Art Kleiner

“That doesn’t mean anyone was actually at
those specific ages,’ Nolan said.

“There were forty-seven known suicides in
Marin in 1980. (There are others we don’t
know about.) Thirty-four were male. Thirteen
were female. Fourteen people shot themselves.
All but one of them were male. Six people died
from car exhaust. Four jumped off the Golden
Gate Bridge. The rest were drug overdoses.”

Dunnigan described the established theories
about why people commit suicide. Freud, for
instance, thought most people have two basic
instinctual drives—the wish to live (Eros) and
the wish to die (Thanatos). Karl Menninger
said a suicidal person acts out a wish to be
killed (“I don’t deserve to live’’), a wish to kill
someone else, or a wish to die. Old people usu-
ally fall into the latter category (“I can’t go
on.”’). Young people usually wish to die or be
killed.

“There is also a need for attention,” she said.
“A lot of these people have worn out their fam-
ily and friends. The coroner’s office tells us that
they can usually tell most people didn’t really
want to die. According to their suicide notes,
they wanted to be rescued. Anyone here can be
suicidal given the right circumstances or the
proper amount of stress.

‘When someone calls, we assume they are
ambivalent, no matter how suicidal they say
they are. Otherwise, they wouldn’t call. For
myself I want the right to choose to live or
die—for example, if I were terminally ill I
don’t know how I’d choose—but anyone who
calls here will have a hell of a battle.

“They let us know that there’s a glimmer of
hope and that’s the side we work with. We feel
them out—we ask if they are thinking of kill-
ing themselves. We try to find alternatives—
not giving them our alternatives, but asking
them what they did the last time they felt this
way, getting them to remember when they
didn’t feel this way.”

About half the people in the room were tak-
ing notes. A woman in her twenties asked,
“What do you say after you ask ‘Are you think-
ing of killing yourself?’ and they say “Yes’?”

“Well, often the simplest response is that
you don’t want them to die. It’s not easy. Deal-

186

ing with suicidal people is usually unreward-
ing. They’re the toughest for therapists, and in
fact dealing with them makes some therapists
become suicidal.” A bearded man in his thir-
ties nodded his head.

A teenage girl with glasses and short-
cropped brown hair said, “You say to the per-
son, ‘I don’t want you to die’ and the person
says ‘Why?’ What’s your answer?”

“You say, ‘I don’t want you to die because |
care about you.’”’

“They go for that?”

“Yes, they do, if you’re sincere.” She
paused. Nobody said anything. The girl
looked dubious. “Have you ever cared about
anyone who wanted to die and not been able to
come up with a reason why they should go on
living? Usually by the time I’m on the phone
awhile I have a rapport going, and by that time
I usually do have a reason that I care about
them. A very intimate relationship builds up
very quickly on the phone. Some of you may
not be able to dredge up any feeling for some of
your callers and in that case you shouldn’t lie
to them. They can spot a phony right away.”

The girl still looked unconvinced, but nod-
ded. Someone else asked, ““What do you do
with your emotions?”

“You talk to fellow counselors, you talk to
staff,’ Noreen Dunnigan said. ‘You don’t let
any individual callers get into a personal rela-
tionship with you. In fact, any counselor who
meets a caller outside of the Center is automat-
ically suspended—not suspended—what’s the
other word for final?”

“Expelled,” someone called out.

“Expelled. We don’t use the word termi-
nated here.”’

Laughter. More talk about what to say to
people on the phone. “We want to explore
their death fantasies and deglamorize them.
How do you know there’s a life hereafter? Have
you known anyone who came back? You won’t
be able to see your own funeral, and show
everyone you were serious. If you overdose
you'll probably choke on your own vomit. Your
bowels will go. Who’s going to find you?

“Get used to saying, ‘I want you to flush the
pills away now,’ instead of saying, ‘Would you

How Not to Commit Suicide

_ mind putting the pills away for us?’ We want

to assert ourselves. We ask, what will your

children think when they find you? What kind
_ of example would this be for your children as a
_way to solve problems? We use all the things

we can think of and sometimes they sound ma-
nipulative. They are manipulative. We want to
get the person through the crisis. We want

them to take the gun away and put it on a shelf

where they can’t see it. Or put it out of the

house, better yet.

“We find out what has given meaning to
their lives. Has it always been this way? What
was it like when it was not this way? Some-

_ times people say they’ve always felt this way.

| You say, ‘Let’s count back and see if that’s
erue. ”

“But isn’t that denying what they just
said?” someone asked.

“No, you acknowledge their feeling but you
want to doa reality test with them. ‘It sounds
like you've always felt this way but let’s talk
more about it.’”’

“Tr sounds like you’re trying to instill

| guilt.”

“We don’t want them to feel any worse

_ than they already do. But often they haven't

thought about everything. It’s like tunnel vi-

sion. Usually it hasn’t dawned on them who it
| will affect or what the long-range effects of

their act will be. Once they realize it they often

| don’t want the suicide to happen. They don’t

want to die; they want the pain to stop. People
who are sure about killing themselves rarely
call the suicide hotline.”

| Telephone crisis hotlines didn’t exist until
1958, when two Los Angeles psychologists

bs acl

' stumbled across a bulging file of suicide notes
_ in the coroner's office. Intrigued by the lack of

research on rescuing or preventing suicides,
they made themselves available for emergency
consultation to suicidal patients. Soon it
seemed like daytime hours weren’t enough, so
they set up a phone where patients could call
day and night, and manned it with seven staff
members. This was the first telephone crisis

hotline of any kind, ever. After a few months

the paid staff couldn’t handle the number of
calls, so the doctors trained volunteers.

By trial and error they worked out the prin-
ciples that most suicide prevention work is
based on now. Find out first how lethal a per-
son’s intentions are and defuse their plans as
quickly as possible. Don’t talk about how
much there is to live for; ask the callers what
their options are. Encourage callers to talk toa
different counselor every time they call, so one
doesn’t get overloaded. Assume that because
they called they are asking for help and you
have a mandate to save their lives however you
can, including tracing the call and sending the
police.

Personally, I feel suicide prevention volun-
teers, like volunteer firemen, are among the
truest altruistic community heroes we have.
Telephone hotlines are probably the readiest
and least manipulative escape valves available
for the lonely or depressed. A lot of their value
comes from the quality of the people who put
in time on them. Most work six to eight hours
a week, and the people I’ve talked to or heard
about say they volunteer mainly because they
like the other people who work there.

Some volunteers got their start with the
drug abuse bad-trip hotlines of the sixties, and
drug and suicide hotlines co-evolved, taking
methods, enthusiasm, and staff people from
each other. Other hotlines like poison control
or sex information developed later from these.

The upper-echelon professional suicidology
scene is more like an academic industry. Ed-
ward Shneidman and Norman Farberow, those
two Los Angeles psychiatrists who started it
all, have thirteen books in print on the subject
between them. Most are collections of essays
by respectable social scientists. Farberow’s lat-
est, The Many Faces of Suicide (1980; $21.95
postpaid from McGraw-Hill Book Company,
Princeton Road, Hightstown, New Jersey
08520), says that sky-diving, intervening in
violent crimes, drunk driving, prostitution,
gambling, and taking risks in general are all
suicidal, and implies they can be treated
psychiatrically.

In suicide prevention much of the training
is learning to listen and react to people. You

187

Art Kleiner

have to ask direct questions, like “What hap-
pened next?” instead of trying to smooth over
bad feelings. You have to learn to keep some-
one who sounds apathetic about everything on
the phone until you dredge up something they
can get excited about. You have to find out
what’s going on at the other end—are the call-
ers drinking? Have they abused a child? Are
they calling so they can masturbate while they
talk to you?—and you have to find out without
making judgment about any of those things.

The end of every call is supposed to involve a
contract. The caller agrees they will call again
before they try suicide, or they will set a small
goal for themselves, like writing a letter, and
do it. Or they’ll go for therapy. The exception
is the six percent of people who commit sui-
cide before or during the telephone call. They
get the police and ambulance sent to their
door.

“Someone calls up and says, ‘I just took all
these pills, and now I don’t want to die-—
that’s easy,’ David Nolan said. ““They’re will-
ing to give you their address. One counselor
stays on the phone with them, the other calls
for the emergency vehicles. It’s a code 3—
lights and sirens—but we like them to turn
them off when they get near the house.

“Other times a caller says, ‘I just took fifty
Valiums and I’m drinking a quart of vodka and
I want to talk to you while I die.’ We don’t do
that. If we think a life is in danger, we take
over. Getting them to tell us where they are
depends on the skill of the counselor. ‘I need to
know where you are and I need to know right
now. You are dying.’ It’s extremely eerie when
a person is told he is dying.

“If we have to we will hold them on the line
and trace the call. In Marin, tracing takes
thirty minutes to two hours, so we usually
don’t do it. Other places, we hear, are faster.
Once it’s traced, we tell the people that we are
sending over an ambulance. (Not every suicide
prevention center tells them, but it’s our pol-
icy.) ‘You called suicide prevention,’ we say,
‘and you're dying, and I’m sending you some
help.’ We ask them to turn on the lights and
unlock the door. We don’t break contact over
the phone until the emergency people get
there.”

188

Marc Rubin, a paramedic with the San Fran-
cisco Department of Public Health, heard I
was doing this article and suggested I inter-
view him. Until then it never occurred to me
to interview any of the emergency people who
are sent to the scene of a suicide. I didn’t real-
ize that they are probably more involved with
the suicidal person than anyone else. They’re
the first people who comfort them, the only
people who see where they live and what they
did to themselves, and they seem to get a more
vivid idea of the person’s personality than any-
one else, until they drop them off at the hospi-
tal and never see them again. Rubin talked like
he had been storing up feelings for some time.
He made me wonder if working in emergen-
cies by nature makes people impassioned and
articulate.

“Half my ambulance calls just involve going
to a person’s house, calming them down, rec-
ommending they go toa doctor in the morn-
ing. It’s a ‘give me strokes’ kind of call. People
just want to talk to somebody. If they call
emergency and say they’re contemplating sui-
cide they are sent the ambulance and the po-
lice. If there’s violence the police go first—
they’re paid to risk their lives. Then we take
the people to the hospital.

“If you talk to the police and paramedics
you find they feel many of these people should
be allowed to die. We’re bound by our jobs to
make them live, but there’s a lot of distaste for
it. You never know if the suicidal person was
distraught or made a rational decision. It’s real
hard to put a value judgment on it.

“We see a lot of alcoholics, gays, recently
divorced or separated people, lonely people.
People that I would characterize as emotionally
vulnerable. We see them at the height of their
vulnerability. We see some people who cut
their wrists gingerly, knowing that it won’t
kill them, just to try it and see what it feels
like. We see others who are serious about it,
actively seeking it out but not sure if they’re
going to do it until the moment comes. Those
are the ones we have to talk to as they’re about
to jump off a building.

“My last call of the shift last night was a
man who shot himself. I got there and saw this
girl cool in the doorway: ‘I think my father’s

How Not to Commit Suicide

| shot himself. Check downstairs.’ His wife said,

‘I didn’t want him around any more and he

- shot himself.’ He was Chilean. In some cul-

tures in a situation like that they don’t think
the man’s a jerk if he takes his life. It’s the
courageous thing to do.

“T like working on the street. People in
emergency rooms get patients for a length of
time, but I do my medical things and get them
there and then I’m done. My role is medical
intervention. I make sure they don’t compro-
mise their vital functions. That means check-

_ ing their airway—listening for the movement
_ of air through the mouth and nose—and their

breathing rhythm—are their lungs expanding?
And checking their heartbeat—is it fast
enough? Is it stopped? If it’s off you have to do

_ cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, which in-

| volves pressing on the sternum and spine to get

the heart going again. A lot of times if some-
one’s lost fluid or if they’re in shock we have to
replace the fluid or blood intravenously.

“If they’re suicidal we are always required to
take them to the emergency room. If they’re
conscious, say if I’ve just bandaged their arm,
then as a courtesy I'll ask if they'll come to the
hospital with us. If they’re upset or say no,
they’lI still have to come, though.

“There are so many scenarios. Most of the
time the police, medical people, and firemen
are compassionate, but it’s still scary. There are

_ six or eight people in uniforms looking at this

scared, vulnerable person. If everything goes
well, they might even like giving up responsi-
bility for themselves to the people in uniform.
But otherwise, all it might take for them to go
off the handle is for somebody to make a wise-
crack—-say if the patient’s in drag. Or some-
times people get angry just because you're in a
uniform. Then you have to talk them down.

“I stay professional a lot of the time—not
cold, but impersonal. Then I move up or down
from there to more or less professional in tone.
Sometimes Il] talk to the person about why
they did it, what their alternatives are. If
they’re hysterical I try to get them to talk
about something they like to do. I'll talk about
my own problems, real or contrived.

“Society doesn’t support its losers. A theme
I get repeatedly from suicides is, ‘Look at me,

The suicide notes on these pages were gathered
at coroners’ offices by a suicidologistlpsychia-
trist who asked to be anonymous. He edited
identifying details out of the compiled manu-
script, and we changed the names. But the
text of each letter plus the age and sex given
ave real. All these people did kill themselves.
Were they ambivalent about it? About half
the hundred or so letters we saw seemed to
have some element of doubt.

(There’s a strange story in computer folk-
lore about a suicide note that appeared late
one night on the Arpanet computer network.
The other people on the network had regularly
corresponded with the man, but always under
the name of his lab, not his own name. When
the message saying he was killing himself
flashed on the screen they tried to call the po-
lice, but nobody could identify him, and he
died.)

Art Kleiner

Married female, age 59

Dear David,

After six weeks of streptomycin shots
and a total of eleven weeks of rest in bed
we have conclusive proof that the ulcers
in my bronchial tubes have not healed.
The short period of the streptomycin in-
halations could not have brought on the
results if the ulceration had even par-
tially healed. To try further would mean
many more months of bed rest—more
shots and inhalations—I can’t remain at
the hospital for the winter months and a
prolonged stay at a rest home is out of
the question. I did some figuring—the
weekly rate there—the amount of strep-
tomycin for shots and inhalations plus
the doctor’s weekly visits would total to
over $200 a week—I can’t bleed my
family for any such amount of money,
and that means that as soon as the money
I have in my checking account runs out I
would have to return home—back to the
same conditions which caused me to go
downhill so steadily. It’s a vicious circle
from which there seems no escape. I
could of course use up the money from
the sale of our furnishings and silver as
well as some I put aside for the furnish-
ing of our home—but all of it put to-
gether would be like a drop in the
bucket—besides I am now convinced

189

Art Kleiner

that my condition is too chronic and
therefore a cure doubtful.

All of a sudden all will and determi-
nation to fight on has left me. I have
long ago prepared myself for the time
when I reached the end of the trail. I feel
calm and at peace and grateful that I can
go to sleep painlessly. I feel justified in
terminating a life which no longer holds
any hope of having the essentials which
make it worth living—I did desperately
want to get well—lI still had much to
live for—hope for recovery—hope of a
reunion with the children—work which
I loved and which could have given me
financial security and great satisfaction.
But it was not to be—I am defeated and
exhausted physically and emotionally.

Please tell the children that I loved
them always and that my love has never
faltered. I grieve that I could not have
had the joy of being close to our babies,
but that is no one’s fault. Thank God
they are well—with my passing all men-
ace to their wellbeing will have
disappeared.

I want you to know that I have a deep
affection for you. I am deeply grateful
for all your kindness. I wish I could
have made a happier life for you. It was
mostly my fault, please forgive me.

Please write to Fran and Tony and to
Marilyn and Jim and tell them that my
love and gratitude could not possibly be
put into words. Their generosity, devo-
tion, love and tact made it possible for
me to accept their financial help over a
long period of time. I wish with all my
heart that they might have been better
rewarded—All of you, my dear ones, I
ask to keep my memory alive in your
hearts—To live on in the hearts of our
dear ones is all that I can conceive of im-
mortality. Please think of me kindly.
Remember that which was good and
lovely in our relationship and forgive me
for the many mistakes I have made. Now
that it 1s all said I feel at peace.

I want Dr. B. to officiate at my fu-
neral. I think Joe would like to have him
with him at that time.

Dear David, I am sad that I must go
just a few days before your birthday—

190

I’ve failed and I don’t want to go seek help.’
There’s a lot of embarrassment. I tell them
everybody needs help. A lot of people go to
psychiatrists—doctors, police, politicians. I
try to get them laughing. I don’t myself but I
try to get them to.

“T kind of enjoy it. As you know there are
realms of thought under a psychedelic that you
can’t enter any other way. Psychosis is like that
and that’s why I appreciate it. I’ve sung things
like quasi-Indian chants with people. I find
that some policemen do the same. There’s
often a lesson that a psychotic person is offer-
ing me. Not to get too dependent on some-
thing—habits, jobs, people, money, family—
that has let someone down. Or not to take my-
self too seriously. I think you have to be some-
what egocentric to attempt suicide. I ask the
egocentric ones sometimes if the world is really
going to care that much.

“There’s a lot of voyeurism in it. I find that
with a lot of medical people. They’! hear a hot
call—a knifing, maybe—and really want to
see it. Anytime you have a collection of fire
and ambulance equipment, people gather on
the street.

“A lot of people don’t want to take the re-
sponsibility. A friend of mine had a call down-
town—a man on a roof twenty stories high.
She stayed up there talking with this man. Can
you imagine how you'd feel if he said, ‘No, no,
you're wrong’ and jumped off?

“That guy who shot himself in the head last
night—I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to
resuscitate him. He was warm but the chances
of living were too low. If he had had any other
signs of life—blood pressure, pulse, respira-
tions—I would have had to do something. It’s
hard to do heroics to bring someone back to
life for a day or two. I had a mana couple of
months ago who had been shot in the head and
I did resuscitate him. I felt bad that he had
the trauma of being slapped in an ambulance.
Things like that you have to try to do—you
have to try.

“The whole idea of trauma centers is to take
people who would die otherwise and bring
them back to life. Whether their life is mean-
ingful or not doesn’t matter. We go for every-

| i

How Not to Commit Suicide

_ body. You’re usually naked when you go in. I
_ can’t put it down, but in a way it’s barbaric. I
_ wouldn’t want to go through it. If I’m that

_ close I'd just as soon let it go.”

Until recently, emergency room doctors were
_ people who'd rather be elsewhere. Even now, a
_ lot of emergency room doctors are moonlight-

ing residents or specialists forced by their hos-
pitals’ rotating assignments to do occasional

_ “trauma duty.” But emergency medicine is be-

coming a specialty of its own, perhaps because
four times as many people per capita visit

emergency rooms as did twenty years ago. If

_ someone you know is in danger of dying, call

emergency services, not your family doctor,

because that’s what the emergency room
does—keeps people from dying.

The basic principle for keeping suicides
from dying is to do as little as possible. Most
drug overdosers are left unconscious in a place
where they can heal. The more the hospital has
to do, the more chance of infection or acci-
dent. Drugs, including psychiatric drugs, are
avoided, because they might react with drugs
the patient already took. Before the 1940s,
when Swedish doctors discovered this, about
forty-five percent of the barbiturate overdose
patients in emergency rooms died from at-
tempts to wake them up with drugs. Now
more than ninety-five percent of people who
come into the emergency room on a drug over-
dose live. Many suffer no more than a day or
week of discomfort in a hospital bed, like a
teenager I heard about who tried to kill himself
with 100 vitamin tablets. Others compound
their problem with severe medical damage that
may be permanent or take years to go away.

My information on the medical aftermath of
suicide comes from half a dozen interviews
with emergency room staff people, but two
were especially helpful—Larry Bedard, M.D..,
a former psychiatric resident who now manages
the emergency room at Marin General Hospi-
tal, San Rafael, and Howard McKinney,
Pharm. D., a pharmacologist with the San
Francisco Poison Control Center, who answers
telephone inquiries and consults with emer-
gency room staff. Like other emergency room

but it so happened to pan out. I see no
good in incurring the expense and mis-
ery of the bronchoscopy. I wish I could
spare you the ordeal you have ahead. Try
not to grieve. I ask all of you, my dear
ones, not to mourn my passing. Be glad
I am at least free from the miseries and
loneliness I have endured for so long and
that at last I’ll have peace and rest. . .

Single female, age 21

My dearest Andrew,

It seems as if I have been spending all
my life apologizing to you for things

that happened whether they were my
fault or not.

I am enclosing your pin because I
want you to think of what you took from
me every time you see it.

I don’t want you to think I would kill
myself over you because you're not
worth any emotion at all. It is what you
cost me that hurts and nothing can re-
place it.

Single male, age 51
Sunday 4:45 PM Here goes

To who it may concern

Though I am about to kick the bucket
I am as happy as ever. I am tired of this
life so am going over to see the other

side.

Good luck to all.
Benjamin P.

Married male, age 48

Elaine Darling,

My mind—always warped and
twisted—has reached the point where I
can wait no longer—I don’t dare wait
longer—until there is the final twist and
it snaps and I spend the rest of my life in
some state run snake pit.

Iam going out—and I hope it is
out—Nirvanha, I think the Bhudaists
(how do you spell Bhudaists?) call it
which is the word for “nothing.” That's
as I have told you for years, is what I
want. Imagine God playing a dirty trick
on me like another life!!!

I’ve lived 47 years—there aren't 47
days I would live over again if I could
avoid it.

I9I

Art Kleiner

Mosby’s Manual of Clinical Procedures

Nasotracheal route

Orotracheal route

Pressure-control
external balloon

Low pressure cuff

Radiopaque stripe

Drug overdoses can cause inability to breathe,
which in turn can cause brain damage. The im-
mediate remedy, intubation, involves running
an endotracheal tube through a patient’s nose or
mouth to their lungs—thus clearing an airway.
The photo shows a “properly secured ET tube”:
the diagram shows the path the tube takes down
to the lungs.

Let us, fora moment be sensible. I do
not remember if the partnership agree-
ment provides for a case like this—but if
it doesn’t and I think it doesn’t, I would
much prefer—I haven’t time to make
this a legal requirement—but, I would
much prefer that you, as executrix under
my will, do not elect to participate in
profits for 2 or 3 years or whatever it may
be that is specified there. My partners
have been generous with me while I
worked with them. There is no reason
why, under the circumstances of my

192

staff people I talked to about this article, both
these men are among the most thoughtful, di-
rect people I have met.

This is not an exhaustive survey; anything
less than a medical textbook is bound to be
sketchy, misleading in places, and
oversimplified. *

Most suicides are drug overdoses, and many
drug overdose patients reach the hospital in a
coma. The danger in all drug overdoses is that
the brain may not get enough oxygen. The air-
way to the lungs may get blocked off by the
patient’s vomit, or by the tongue falling back
into the throat, or by drug-induced slowdown
in the part of the deep brain that controls the
rate and depth of breathing. Or the heart may
seize and fibrillate—all the heart muscle fibers
quiver, but none in rhythm with each other.
The blood doesn’t move, so it doesn’t take oxy-
gen to the brain or carry away waste.

It only takes three to five minutes without
oxygen to do permanent damage to the brain,
starting at its most sophisticated sections. The
memory ts destroyed; the ability to read or
speak is cut back. The longer it goes on, the
more severe the retardation. So any poisoned
patient is constantly monitored to make sure
they can breathe and their heart is beating. If
they can’t breathe, they are intubated. A phy-
sician slides a tube down their mouth or nose,
through their throat, into their lungs for air to

pass through.

Drug overdose patients are usually given
sugar (in case they have low blood sugar), thia-
mine (which might have been depleted from

* Some books in The Next Whole Earth Catalog which I
found useful for information are Licit and Illicit Drugs

(p. 579), The Essential Guide to Prescription Drugs (p. 326)
and the emergency medicine textbooks reviewed on

p. 311. A good book to browse in for the technical story
of drug effects on people (along with anything else in
pharmacology) is the classic medical text Pharmacological
Basis of Therapeutics (Louis S$. Goodman and Alfred Gil-
man, Editors; 1941, 1980; $45 postpaid from McGraw-
Hill Book Company, Princeton Road, Hightstown, New
Jersey 08520). A good emergency room guide with illus-
trations is Atlas of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Procedures for
Emergency Personnel by James H. Cosgriff, Jr. (1978; $26
postpaid from J. P. Lippincott Company, Keystone In-
dustrial Park, Scranton, Pennsylvania 18512).

?

How Not to Commit Suicide

the blood by alcohol) and Narcan, an antidote
for opiates. They're given because the deficien-
cies or drug effects they correct are hard to spot
right away and can be quickly lethal. Com-
pared to the very few other antidotes that exist,
these are considered low-risk. Patients are
often given Ipecac, which makes them vomit.
Then they are given activated charcoal, which
looks like gruel and soaks up some of the poi-
son in the intestines before coming out in diar-
rhea induced by a cathartic, magnesium cit-
rate. The cathartic also increases the rapidity
with which the poison goes through the intes-
tines, thus cutting down the amount absorbed
by the body.

If the patient is in a coma a tube may be run
through the nose or mouth and passed bit by
bit down the esophagus into the stomach. A
saline solution flows through it into the stom-
ach, and then is sucked back through the tube
with some of the poison. Emergency room staff
call this “lavage’’; on the street it’s known as
getting your stomach pumped.

“If you come in awake and alert you should
not have your stomach washed out,” Bedard
said. “But some doctors and nurses don’t like
to take care of overdoses. They feel like suici-
dal people should be punished, so they stick
a tube down. It’s not pleasant—the tube is
about the size of your thumb. Most people feel
like they’re choking to death.”

The two most common types of drugs in
suicides, McKinney said, are those found
around the house and those used in psycho-
therapy. Seemingly innocent aspirin is “one of
the messiest, most complicated overdoses you
ever hope to see,” he said. People who swallow
lots of aspirin react first by getting sick to
their stomachs. Beyond that, it affects nearly
every system in the body unpredictably, and
two different people who took 100 aspirins
could get sick in completely different ways.
Aspirin is an acid. It burns the gastrointestinal
tract from the inside. It changes the blood’s
pH level, which is normally 7.4 (close to neu-
tral). It sometimes makes the blood acidic, but
it also accelerates the brain’s breathing control
center, which puffs out carbon dioxide twice as
fast as it normally would, and thus makes the

synadvsay J, puv mqsousviq fo sopry pauuossag Kauadsauy 4Of SasnpaI0ad

The Salem sump tube, one of the several types
that are passed down a patient’s esophagus in
gastric lavage, or ‘stomach pumping.” The pro-
cess is usually used only with patients in comas
or conscious suicidal patients who are being
“punished.”

withdrawal from the firm, they should
pay anything more.

I could wish that I had, for my
goodby kiss, a .38 police special with
which I have made some good scores—
not records but at least made my mark.
Instead, I have this black bitch—bitch,
if the word is not familiar to you—but
at least an honest one who will mean
what she says.

The neighbors may think it’s a motor
backfire, but to me she will whisper—
“Rest—Sleep.”’

Albert

193

Art Kleiner

P.S. I think there is enough insurance to
see Valerie through school, but if there
isn t—I am sure you would out of the
insurance payments, at least—

I hope further and I don’t insist that
you have the ordinary decensy—decency
that is—to do so—Wéill you see Valerie
through college—she is the only one
about whom I am concerned as this .38
whispers in my ear.

Married male, age 45
My darling,
May her guts rot in hell—I loved her so
much.
Henry

Divorced female, age O1

You cops will want to know why I did it,
well, just let us say that I lived 61 years
too many.

People have always put obstacles in
my way. One of the great ones is leaving
this world when you want to and have
nothing to live for.

I am not insane. My mind was never
more clear. It has been a long day. The
motor got so hot it would not run so I
just had to sit here and wait. The breaks
were against me to the very last.

The sun is leaving the hill now so
hope nothing else happens.

Married male, age 74

What is a few short years to live in hell.
That is all I get around here.

No more I will pay the bills.

No more I will drive the car.

No more I will wash, iron, & mend
any clothes.

No more I will have to eat the leftover
articles that was cooked the day before.

This is no way to live.

Either is it any way to die.

Her grub I can not eat

At night I can not sleep.

I married the wrong nag-nag-nag and
I lost my life.

W.S.

to the undertaker

We have got plenty money to give me
a decent burial. Don’t let my wife kid

194

blood alkaline. Either way, it throws off the
metabolic balance among kidney, lung, and
blood. “It produces fever,” McKinney said.
“The fever, in turn, if it goes on long enough
to overheat the brain, can cause seizures. You
can burn out parts of your nervous system.”
Aspirin also carries a high risk of gastric hem-
orrhage. Occasionally people on aspirin over-
doses become deaf or develop a ringing in their
ears that doesn’t go away.

The pain-reliever acetaminophen, sold as
Tylenol, also makes people sick to their stom-
achs at first, but then gets more deadly. The
drug changes into toxic particles that are usu-
ally neutralized by glutathione, one type of
coenzyme found in the liver. In overdose, if it
isn’t pumped out in time, the toxic particles
deplete all the glutathione, causing the painful
death of an hepatic coma. Even relatively late
in the process surrogate glutathione can save
the liver, but if the organ does become diseased
the results can be similar to those of hepatitis:
jaundice, itchy skin, depression, long-term
listlessness, inability to eat much.

“The liver detoxifies poisons that build up
in the body,” McKinney said. “If you destroy
the liver it’s like never taking the garbage out.
Specifically the most common buildup is am-
monia in the blood, which you know if it goes
too far will put you in a very deep coma, and
then kill you.”

Both McKinney and Bedard told me about
people who took Tylenol or phosphorus, which
also destroys the liver (and incidentally pro-
duces phosphorescent vomit). In both cases,
they slept off the initial sickness, and recov-
ered for five days—during which time they
decided suicide was a mistake after all, and
they wanted to live. But the liver had been
destroyed, and after five days each of them
started to feel very sick, passed into deep
coma, and died. “He knew it would happen,
and that there was nothing we could do about
it,” Bedard said, “and his friends and family
knew it, and for five days they sat in the hospi-
tal together waiting for it.”

Probably the most painful form of suicide
attempt, whether or not it ends in death, is
swallowing lye, Drano, oven cleaner, and other

How Not to Commit Suicide

household caustics. Most of us know how pain-
_ ful these are because scare stories have been

_ passed down in household lore from 100 years

_ ago, when caustics were the preferred suicide

method. Unlike suicides today, who visualize
themselves slipping off into oblivion, people
who killed themselves in the nineteenth cen-
tury expected to suffer along the way.

“Very few people that ingest caustics die,”
McKinney said. “If they do die, it’s days,

_ weeks, or even months later, of infection. I’m
| pretty immune to most gore, but I draw the

line at the burn unit.’’ Caustics scar the mouth

_and tongue, puncture holes in the esophagus,

burn the chest from the inside and block the
gastrointestinal tract with scar tissue. Even the
process of treating inner burns is painful; sur-

| geons drop an endoscope, or fiber-optic cam-

era, down the person’s throat, unavoidably
scraping it against the raw nerves there, to see
what the damage is. Repairing an inner burn
can take fifteen or twenty years worth of sur-
gical operations, plus fluid therapy and anti-
biotics to keep infections from growing. Swal-
lowing can be painful for the rest of a person’s

| life, and some survivors of such attempts have

to be fed intravenously for years afterwards.
Psychiatric drugs—phenothiazines like
Thorazine or Haldol, tricyclic antidepressants
like Elavil—cause what are probably the most
morally offensive overdose cases. “It’s a built-in
irony,’ McKinney said. “The very population
of patients currently under therapy to suppos-
edly avoid suicide are often handed enormous
quantities of medication. You might as well
give the guy a gun. Except for child abuse,
nothing outrages the emergency room staff as

- much as when someone comes in with an over-

dose on Thorazine and you go through their
pockets and see the same doctor has prescribed
three or four hundred tablets in a two-week pe-
riod. Those are the doctors who get a phone
call at three A.M. saying, “You better get down
here now and see your patient.’”’ (Hardly ever
does the psychiatrist show up, McKinney and
other doctors told me; it’s more common for
the answering service to find out who’s calling
and why and then say the psychiatrist is out of
town.)

you by saying she has not got any
money.
Give this note to the cops.
Give me liberty or give me death.
W.S.

Married male, age 45

Dear Claudia,

You win, I can’t take it any longer, I
know you have been waiting for this to
happen. I hope it makes you very happy,
this is not an easy thing to do, but I’ve
got to the point where there is nothing
to live for, a little bit of kindness from
you would of made everything so differ-
ent, but all that ever interested you was
the dollar.

It is pretty hard for me to do anything
when you are so greedy even with this
house you couldn’t even be fair with
that, well it’s all yours now and you
won't have to see the Lawyer anymore.

I wish you would give my personal
things to Danny, you couldn’t get much
from selling them anyway, you still have
my insurance, it isn’t much but it will
be enough to take care of my debts and
still have a few bucks left.

You always told me that I was the one
that made Sharon take her life, in fact
you said I killed her, but you know
down deep in your heart it was you that
made her do what she did, and now you
have two deaths to your credit, it should
make you feel very proud.

Good By Kid
P.S. Disregard all the mean things I’ve
said in this letter, I have said a lot of
things to you I didn’t really mean and I
hope you get well and wish you the best
of everything.
Cathy—don’t come in.
Call your mother, she will know what to
do.
Love
Daddy
Cathy don’t go in the bedroom.

Married female, age 50

When a “man” doesn’t know where to
take his wife—then she isn’t a wife any
more—

195

Art Kleiner

I hope you will be “free” to take any-
one any place and I’m sure you will not
have any trouble as to places—

Please don’t tell my mother the
truth—your whole tribe is partly re-
sponsible for this—from your mother on
down—hope they are satisfied.

Married female, age 56

About the Evil god (yes)

About the Evil Seers killing people
for their money (yes)

Iam a profit at my death

Iam a root of the stem of Jesse (yes)

We have made many discoveries. We
have found out who the people with the
mark of the beast are. And the devil was
a human being now killed and cast into
hell and the angel with the keys of the
bottomless pit is in hell casting out all
the good souls which these evil people
have cast into hell for no reason. The
good Seers who serve our God are 13 to
/; of the evil ones in this world. We are
better than holding our owne but in
Heaven God is almost over come and |
kill myself so I may go and help him,
because I have a funny little quirk in my
brain which helps.

6 palmy each at a few years sport. Our
god will send them into the world.

Single male, age 13

I know what I am doing. Annette found

out. Ask Cara. I love you all.
Bill

Widowed female, age 52
(Her husband died three months before.)

Please tell Ron’s folks I love them very
much but my heart breaks when I see or
hear from them. Also all our friends es-
pecially Irene and Charles and Ella I love
them also. Forgive me for not seeing
them.

Everyone seems so happy and I am so
alone. Amy. I wanted to visit you but I
am going around ina dream. Alice I
wanted to help you paint but how could
I with a broken heart. And my head
aches so much any more my nerves are
ready to break and what would happen if
they did.

196

“Tricyclic antidepressant patients are in a
particular high-risk situation,’ McKinney
said. “Typically a person is depressed over a
long time; he goes to a psychiatrist and after
some psych workshop procedures it’s decided
he needs an antidepressant. Classically, Elavil
is prescribed. Elavil takes three to eight weeks
to work, and an average of four weeks. The
person may not be told clearly enough or may
not want to hear that the drug takes a long
time. Two weeks later he bolts upright and
says, ‘This is the biggest crock of shit,’ and
swallows the rest of them.” '

The phenothiazines, or major tranquilizers,
are used to calm down psychosis or extreme
anxiety. The tricyclic antidepressants are
chemical mood elevators. Both work by some-
how altering the minute bursts of chemicals
which neurons send across the synapses, or
gaps between nerves, to carry impulses from
one nerve to another.

Because they affect the nervous system
which in turn reacts with every other system in
the body, psychiatric drugs have lots of side-
effects—dilated pupils, dry mouth, feverish-
ness, speeded-up heartrate, slowed-down
digestive muscles, breakdowns in coordina-
tion, rolling eyes. Overdose can accelerate
these in any part of the body. I once met a man
whose hand muscles had contracted violently
after a phenothiazine overdose, leaving his fin-
gers permanently warped. Tardive dyskinesia,
a Parkinson’s Disease-like condition caused in
some patients by long-term use of the drugs,
can be accelerated by an overdose. Probably the
most common permanent damage from over-
dose is brain damage, caused by seizures and
fibrillation.

The exotic drugs of mystery novels, strych-
nine and cyanide, are painful and deadly but
rarely show up in emergency rooms. What
shows up all the time are sleeping pills and
mood pills—the sedative hypnotics—barbitu-
rates like Seconal, mild tranquilizers like Val-
ium. Typically, a sedative overdose will do
nothing more than put you to sleep for a day or
two, and leave you with a bad hangover and a
case of the slows when you wake up. But like
many other overdoses, sedatives are often taken

,

|

|

|
|

|
|

5|| i

How Not to Commit Suicide

with alcohol, which makes people nauseous.
Anyone who vomits when they’re passed out
risks sucking some of the vomit into their

lungs, which is called aspiration.

It’s as dangerous as it sounds disgusting.
Vomit contains enzymes from the stomach that
destroy tissue, and those go to work on the
lung walls. It also contains a rich broth of
food, perfect for pneumonia bugs to grow in.

People can also drown in vomit, which keeps

air from getting to the brain, which once again
_ causes brain damage. An aspirating patient

|

q

goes into intensive care; a device called a bron-
_ choscope is used to look into their lungs and
pull out whatever pieces of vomit it can.
Drug overdoses are always unpredictable.
‘The drugs react with other drugs people take
| at the time, with alcohol, with odd allergies,
and drugs lingering around in the bloodstream

| from years before. “One fellow took four cold
tablets,” McKinney said, “and went to an

i}

emergency room complaining of a headache.
| He blew the blood vessels behind one of his
eyes out.’

_ Violent death is so often portrayed as sudden
_and painless, but the human body is harder to

| kill than it seems. For instance, people rarely

i . . . . «6
| die from slashing their wrists. ‘‘Most people

who try it aren’t really suicidal,” Bedard said.

}

“Usually it’s a cry for help. A few want to see

_ what it feels like to cut themselves. We just
sew them up and call in the psychiatrist.” Even

if you cut your artery, which most people
| don’t, it’s hard to bleed to death because the

_ bleeding stops on its own unless the cut is ex-
tremely severe. Popular wisdom says sitting in
hot water makes you bleed faster, but Bedard
said he’s known people who tried it, passed

| out, and woke up ina bathtub full of cold

bloody water.

“But it’s an easy way to hurt yourself,” he

| said. “You can damage the tendons and median

| nerve which control the muscles of your hand.
| People end up with claw hands. Lots of times,
' with microsurgery, that can be repaired, but it

_means six to twelve months out of your life,

_ and you still end up with a weak or deformed

hand.”

The few people who cut their throats also

You will say Iam crazy and I can’t go
on this way just half living.

I loved this house once but now it is
so full of memories I can’t stay here. I
have tried to think of some way to go on
but can’t. Am so nervous all the time—I
loved Ron too much but is that a sin,
with him gone I have nothing. Oh I have
the girls and family but they don’t fill
the vacant spot left in my heart. . .

Xmas is coming I can’t go on I’m
afraid I would break down. I’ve thought
of this so many times. I love every one
but I can’t be one of you any more.
Please think kindly of me and forgive
me. I only hope this is fatal then I can
rest and no more trouble to any one. Do
with Lisa whats best I know she has been
a lot of worry to mama and I’m sorry. I
tried to keep the yard up that seemed to
be the only comfort I had. I loved it but
that wasn’t anything. I’ve lost every
thing so why go on. I worshipped Ron
and when he went I lost my whole world
and everything.

I’m so tired and lonely.

There goes a siren. Oh how can I
stand being left. I need to go toa Dr.
but I am afraid. I’m so cold.

Mother
Love, Louise

Married male, age 40
Jimmy!
Remember what I told you and always
respect, protect and obey your mother
and always remember that I love you so
much. I am going to leave you forever
because I am too sick to go on. God
bless you my Son and when your time
comes to go to Heaven you will find your
ole Pappy waiting for you.

Daddy

Single female, age 16
Dear Mother & Dad,
Please forgive me. I have tried to be
good to you both. I love you both very
much and wanted to get along with you
both. I have tried.

I have wanted to go out with you and
Dad but I was always afraid to ask for I
always felt that the answer would be no.

197

Art Kleiner

A chest X-ray of someone who came into a large city hospital unconscious and aspirating after a drug
overdose. The X-ray looks into his front, so the lung on our left is actually the patient’s right lung. That’s
where the trouble is. What looks like gray and white bubbles floating inside is vomit that dripped down
from his throat. His left lung (on our right) is comparatively clean. In a normal X-ray both sides would
look like that. At the top of the throat is the bronchial tube through which they are trying to help him
breathe. The sharp white dots (electrocardiogram probes) and the thing that looks like a telephone cord
(part of the intubation machine) are both outside his body.

I saw this man. He had been running a 106° fever for more than a day when this picture was taken and
his rib cage jerked spasmodically every time he tried to take a breath. His eyes stayed half-open. They
expected him to die. But he was still alive, in the same state, two weeks later. It’s doubtful he will ever be
conscious again. If he stays alive like this he’ll be transferred to a chronic ward in a mental hospital.

—Art Kleiner

198

I

Se =

How Not to Commit Suicide

rarely die. “They often cut the recurrent laryn-

geal nerve,” Bedard said, “the nerve that goes
up to the voicebox and larynx, and lose their
voices. Or they cut themselves and bleed be-
neath the surface until they choke on a buildup
of blood inside the trachea.”

Bedard said most suicide shootings he’s seen

were hostile, done while someone else was

around to react to it. Interestingly, you can
shoot yourself in the head and miss the brain
but merely blow out an eye or part of your jaw.
If you die, the death is usually drawn-out and
painful.

“People can live eight hours with a hole in

_ their head the size of a half dollar,” Bedard

_ said. “If you shoot yourself in the temple, the
| primitive parts of your brain that control

: breathing will go on for a long time, from

| minutes to hours. Eventually they may be shut
_ off by pressure from the swelling of the upper
| brain that was shot. Or they may not be shut

» off at all. One man I treated is completely par-
| alyzed on his left side, and can’t speak, walk,

4 or feed himself. It’s as if he had a major stroke.
| He hit the area of the brain which controls mo-
tor function.”

Jumps and hanging, again from Bedard:

| “I’m amazed at how far you can fall after a

| jump and not kill yourself. Some people have

| fallen 150 feet and lived. They’ll break many

| of their bones, or rupture an organ like the

| spleen. Many people who try to hang them-

| selves don’t fall far enough to jerk their neck

) back and snap their airway. They strangle

_ themselves instead, and don’t always die; they
| get brain damage from lack of oxygen.” People
_who try to poison themselves with gas or car-

bon dioxide may also get brain damage for the
same reason.

And finally, just falling into a coma can lead
to permanent damage. “If you’re slumped on a
table, leaning on your arm for a day anda
half,” Bedard said, “you put pressure on the

armpit. You can permanently damage the

nerve there and make it hard to use your arm.

Or your muscles might start to dissolve into

your bloodstream and clog up your kidneys.
The muscle damage probably eventually re-
turns to normal.”

And about Bud, I want to dismiss
every idea about him. I don’t like him
any more than a companion, for a while
I thought I did but no more, in fact, I
am quite tired of him, as you know, I
get tired of everyone after a while.

And mother, I wish that you hadn’t
called mea liar, and said I was just like
Hap. as I’m not. It is just that am
afraid of you both at times, but I love
you both very much.

So L
one Your loving

daughter
that will always
love you
Mary
P.S. Please forgive me. I want you to, and
don’t think for one minute that I haven’t
appreciated everything you've done.

Single male, age 35
(He committed suicide after he killed
his girlfriend.)

Mommie my Darling,
To love you as I do and live without you
is more than I can bear. I love you so
completely, wholeheartedly without re-
straint. I worship you, that is my fault.
With your indifference to me; is the dif-
ference. I’ve tried so hard to make our
lives pleasant and lovable, but you
didn’t seem to care. You had great plans
which didn’t include me. You didn’t re-
spect me. That was the trouble. You
treated me like a child. I couldn’t reach
you as a man and woman or man and
wife as we've lived. I let you know my
feelings toward you when | shouldn’t
have. How I loved you, what you meant
to me. Without you life is unbearable.
This is the best way. This will solve
all our problems. You can’t hurt me fur-
ther and anyone else. I was a ‘‘toll” while
you needed me or thought you did. But
now that I could use some help, you
won't supply the need that was promi-
nent when you need it. So, good bye my
love. If it is possible to love in the here-
after, I will love you even after death.
May God have mercy on both our souls.
He alone knows my heartache and sor-
row and love for you. paay

199

Art Kleiner

The scars of a young woman who cut herself on
the wrist. “Intensive individual case work sug-
gests that self-laceration may involve an altered
state of consciousness akin to a dissociative

state. . . . There may be no experience of pain
until after the event when there is subjective re-
lief of tension mixed with feelings of disgust and
regret at what has happened.” —Picture and
quote from the clinical psychiatry text
Death Wishes? by H. G. Morgan (1979; John
Wiley and Sons).

Single female, age 31

My boss, Kenneth J., seduced me and
made me pregnant. He refuses to help
me. I had not had intercourse in two
years. He says that I will have to suffer
through it by myself.

Several people know about this—my
doctor, Dr. James R., and Pete M. who
works at Williams. Pete and I never had
a love affair, although Kenneth would
like to drag Pete into it. Also Dr. Ar-
nold W. knows about it.

I have always been such a good girl.

Daddy dear—

As much as it hurts me, I cannot
make it this Friday. I may be in very se-
rious trouble. I have always been a very
good person, but it looks like I really
got ina mess, through no real fault of
my own.

I must have been born to suffer.

Love—Elizabeth
P.S. Call me if you can. When will Sally
be back? I may need her desperately.

200

These clinical generalizations make suicidal
people seem like statistical ciphers who made a
mistake and suffered the immediate, appropri-
ate retribution. But it doesn’t feel like that
at the time. Whether or not you are glad you
were rescued, recovering from a suicide at-
tempt is like being in the emergency room for
any other reason. The flash that brought you
there was over in a moment. The waiting,
being embarrassed, wondering what will hap-
pen next, and bearing sharp or dull pain go on
for hours.

How, according to people who work with
them, do suicide attempters feel when they
wake up in the hospital? Glad they were saved.
Convinced that suicide was a mistake. Angry
they were saved. Angry at the friend or neigh-
bor who betrayed them by calling emergency.
Eager to get out of the hospital so they can try
it again. Embarrassed. Relieved. Happy to be
taken care of. Eager to start taking care of
themselves again. Unwilling to think about it.
Wondering what everyone else they know
thinks about it. Wondering if the person they
were trying to reach will finally pay attention
to them.

“A lot of what I hear in the emergency room
is hostility towards a specific person,” Dr. Be-
dard said. “Once they know they’re not going
to die, they go out of their way to talk to me
about it. ‘I’ll show that son of a bitch. He
didn’t think I had the guts to do it.’ A lot of
these people fantasize about seeing themselves
at the funeral. ‘The whole world’s going to be
upset.’ ”’

There are people who get ignored repeatedly
until they attempt suicide. One woman I heard
about tried to kill herself six times in one year.
“My husband says he’s too busy if I ask him to
take me out to dinner,” she told the emergency
room staff. “But for this he makes time.”

If it isn’t the attention of a particular per-
son, it might be the emergency room staff.
Sadly, many people can only get a lot of paid
professional people to notice them by threaten-
ing their own life. “‘A lot of people we see are
repeaters,’ Bedard said. ‘““They might come in
twenty times in five years. To them it’s a game.
‘Either you take Ipecac and vomit or we'll have

How Not to Commit Suicide

to do gastric lavage,’ we'll say. “You know and I
know it’ll hurt, so why don’t you take the Ipe-
cac?’ Sometimes you see the same people so
often it’s like visiting an old friend.”

Other people take a pill overdose not to risk
their lives, but to find a place where they can
be taken care of and forget their problems for
a little while. “People want time out,” said
Temple University psychiatry professor Mi-
chael Simpson, who ran the emergency psychi-
atric service at Guy’s Hospital in London.
“That’s why sometimes they’ll seek psychiatric
support but leave in a day or two. They used to
be able to do it more freely in the drug culture
by finding a crashpad. Now the medical model
is one of the few excuses for going away and
lying around and having people be kind to you
that is seen as a valid reason to leave work.
Maybe we need other ways to legitimize that.”

People who attempt suicide are almost never
arrested, but they lose their right to decide
what happens to them. In every state, being a
possible danger to yourself, in the opinion of
the psychiatrist who interviews you, is cause
for being held for psychiatric care for a limited
period of time. In California, the period of
time is three days; it can be followed, with an
application to a judge, by a fourteen-day pe-
riod, and after that by another fourteen-day
period. Beyond that, the regular rules for en-
tering a mental hospital voluntarily or being
committed apply. Clearly, how you act at the
initial interview with a psychiatrist has a lot to
do with how long you stay under psychiatric
care. So does the attitude of the psychiatrist
who examines you and the availability of good
or bad psychiatric facilities in your area.
Rarely are patients held longer than three
days for psychiatric reasons. In fact, some hos-
pitals send more than half of the suicidal pa-
tients home as soon as they can go. Some pa-
tients are routed to state or private psychiatric
hospitals; some go to local board-and-care
homes or halfway houses or outpatient clinics
or nowhere at all. “The only generalization you
can make,” said Ed Hamell, a senior psychiat-
ric specialist at a private psychiatric hospital in
Washington, D.C., “is that people who find

Married male, age 52

Dear Joan,
For 23 years we lived happy together.
Our married life was ideal, until two
years ago when I witnessed Kristy die in
the hospital something snapped in me.
You remember when I returned from the
hospital I broke down. That was the be-
ginning of my illness. Since then my
condition was getting progressively
worse, I could neither work or think log-
ically. You have been thru “Hell” with
me since then. Only you and I know
how much you have lived thru. I feel
that I will not improve and can’t keep on
causing you and the children so much
misery. I loved you and was proud of
you. I loved the children dearly and
could not see them suffer so much on
account of me.
Dear Children:
Please forgive me.
Love, Frank

Divorced female, age 37

To No-one and Everyone:

Because of a growing conviction that a
hereditary insanity is manifesting itself
beyond my control, Iam taking this way
out—before mere nuisance attacks and
rages against others assume a more dan-
gerous form.

Because I am an agnostic and believe
funeral fanfare to be nonsense—I ask
that it be forgotten. Instead, knowing
there to be a marked shortage of cadavers
for the medical profession, for which I
have endless respect, I hereby bequeath
1) my body to medics for dissection; also
2) To Mark B. all personal effects—to be
divided as whim decrees—with Dr. Lois
J., L. A. and to each—a deep fondness
and love. 3) To Joe A. the greatest devo-
tion—the kind that “‘passeth all under-
standing.” 3a) And my life.

Anita R.
4) To my father, Vincent N., the sum of
one dollar ($1)

Trina, a college student, 21 years old

Fall quarter I called Suicide Prevention.
I'd called them before and the people

201

Art Kleiner

were nice, but this time the woman
acted a little indignant. “Why the hell
do you want to do something like that?”
she asked. We talked until she said she
had other phone calls. But she made me
promise I wouldn’t try without calling
back first. I had a bottle of Coricidin
from a wisdom tooth operation. I'd been
thinking about it for a month off and
on. Much later that night I took ten
Coricidin and went to bed. I woke up in
the morning feeling really rotten—
weepy, groggy. I could hardly move. I
thought I was going to die any minute.
My roommate came home and got a
friend to drive me to the school infir-
mary, where they gave me something
that made me sick to my stomach. The
doctor who gave it to me calmed me
down. She said it happens to a lot of
people, the pills wouldn’t hurt me. I felt
tingly, like I might pass out any minute.

I was immediately taken in a wheel-
chair to the psychiatrist’s office. I talked
to him about five minutes. He kept yell-
ing at me about why did I take the pills,
why didn’t I do this or that. I remember
thinking, boy this man isa real jerk. I
told him I didn’t want to see him any
more. He said, ‘““That’s fine,” and put
me ina locked room with bars on the
windows. I couldn’t make phone calls. I
felt humiliated, which made me angry.
I’m not crazy. I’m not weird. I don’t
want people to look at me like I’m nuts.
I'm not some nutty kid who tried to
knock herself off. I was most angry at
being stuck in that room. I expected to
be put in a straitjacket any minute. I
complained until they moved me toa
pretty room and let me make phone
calls.

I was there about two weeks. My
psychiatrist kept harping at me about
school—-was I going to stay in or drop
out? I saw him ten minutes a day. The
other patients and one orderly helped me
a lot more than he did. I just wanted to
find a place where I could be alone and
think about things. I left feeling like not
much had been accomplished, except
letting me know that I didn’t want to at-

202

themselves in hospitals following suicide at-
tempts will be treated as not able to be respon-
sible for their own safety.”

Howard Blackstone, the clinical director of
the Marin County mental health crisis unit,
told me some of the things that happen in the
initial psychiatric interview. “We're trying to
find out what happened. Was it well thought
out or was it impulsive? What kinds of prob-
lems led up to that point? What state were
they in when they tried to do it? How likely
are they to try it again? Oftentimes someone
will come in upset, but after a day or two hold
they will look back and say ‘Why the hell did I
do that?’ If we believe that someone is still per-
turbed and still ruminating about how to kill
themselves, we are required to hold on to
them. We evaluate reasons less than states of
mind. The purpose of what we’re doing is to
help someone out of a state of mind where they
may do something not in their best interest.”

Beyond that, I can’t generalize about the
psychiatric consequences of suicide. There are
too many possibilities, they differ too much
from place to place, and the patient has too lit-
tle control over where he or she ends up. In
many psychiatric institutions (and other social
welfare institutions, like nursing homes) sui-
cide is a sensitive issue, because a funding
agency may investigate an institution if a sui-
cide happens within its walls. Or a psychiatrist
may be held responsible for a suicide if it can
be proved he knew about it beforehand and
didn’t act reasonably to prevent it. Here as
everywhere else, the main priority is keeping
the person alive.

That may be changing. “There are a grow-
ing number of people in the psychiatric com-
munity,’ David Gruder said, “who feel pri-
vately that their patients, regardless of the law,
have the right to decide whether or not to take
their own life. Under certain circumstances,
there are psychiatrists who won't prevent some
of their patients from killing themselves. But
you can’t talk about this out loud too often,
because it’s illegal and could also be grounds
for disbarment.” He said an influential book
for therapists on this subject is Back to One by

How Not to Commit Suicide

Sheldon Kopp (1977; $7.95 postpaid from Sci-
ence and Behavior Books, P.O. Box 1 le
Palo Alto, California 94306).

If you believe, as I did starting this article,

_ that each of us has a right to commit suicide

_ and potentially valid reasons for doing so

_ which should be respected, you might think

_ there’s something gruesome about a system

_ which automatically acts to preserve life,

| whether the person wants it preserved or not.

_ There’s an apocryphal story told in every emer-
_ gency room: someone comes in for the thirtieth
_ or fortieth time on a suicide attempt and a doc-
tor finally explodes and says, “Look, why don’t
| you try it thzs way,” and the patient does next
time and dies. Every professional I talked to—
_ doctor, paramedic, suicide prevention counse-

_ lor, therapist, pharmacologist, nurse—said

_ there have been people who made them think,
‘you're right. You have nothing to live for.’ But
the attempt to save the person’s life is always
made. As Dr. Richard Fein, who directs outpa-
_ tient services at San Francisco General Hospi-
tal, said, to decide whether someone’s life is
worth living in an emergency is gross

arrogance.

__ There are people who think suicide can be a
_ method of natural selection in an overcrowded
_ world. Suicides in prison are often not saved, I
_ was told by several people; the same is true

| sometimes in some cities, for the indigent sui-
| cide, the alcoholic suicide, the aged or non-

_ white suicide. Nobody else wants them; they

| finally succumb to the obvious. Aren’t there

_ people who ought to be killing themselves but
are not?

_ Brr. I’m on the side of saving lives automat-
| ically. I liked what Stuart Bair, who counsels

| many of the desperate and penniless suicide at-
_ tempters at San Francisco General Hospital,

| said: “I believe in miracles. I think there’s al-

| ways a reason to hope someone’s life will im-

_ prove.” And I like what psychiatrist Michael

_ Simpson said about the terminally ill that

| groups like Exit and Hemlock are trying to

| reach: “Those who work with terminal pa-
tients, like people in hospices, say there are

tempt it again. No—I felt like I’ve be-
come a lot more sensitive to people. I
don’t look at their problems as trivial
any more. I almost like it when my
friends come to me with problems. I feel
like I can help now. I still haven’t told
the two people I was most angry at—my
father and my boyfriend—why I was in
the hospital.

Sandra, a clerk, 27 years old

A year ago March, while I was living in
Michigan, I took an overdose of Elavil. I
was seeing a psychiatrist and I was just
getting off the medication. But the bot-
tle was still in my apartment. I’d gone
out and had drinks, came home and

evening or so. I called my boyfriend
Jonathan in California and my social
worker. I told them I had taken the
pills. The social worker told me to drive
to the emergency room. I’d have been
lucky to make it to the front door. Jona-
than called a friend of mine, who came
to the apartment and broke down the
door. I was in a coma for five days. I
guess I was lucky because the doctors
told everybody I wasn’t going to make
it. Then they said I'd have permanent
brain damage. When it didn’t happen
they said it was the miracle of the floor.
I was out of the hospital in about three
weeks; a week of that was in the psychi-
atric ward, which was a real drag.

I had a lot of problems with my mem-
ory for a while. Even now I can’t remem-
ber some things. Starting a week before
the overdose I don’t remember anything
at all. All I know about it is what Jona-
than says I told him over the phone.
Everybody asks ‘““Why did you do it?”
and I don’t know. It sounds real stupid.

Everybody in the hospital was real
nice. I was afraid that they would get
down on me but they didn’t. It was a
Catholic hospital, and I had my own
room. Friends were there 24 hours a day.
It made me realize how many friends I
had. On the psychiatric ward they give
you tests for brain damage. They ask you
a lot of silly questions. They test your

203

Art Kleiner

reflexes, your memory. They give you
EKG tests. It took a while to get back
my coordination. I couldn’t write or do
other things with my hands. Most of the
time I stayed by myself. There were pro-
grams for the other patients but they
didn’t put me in any because they didn’t
know how long I would be staying.

I'd tried twice before, but those times
weren't serious. I was just trying to get
some attention. The first time I was
fourteen, and I slashed my wrists. It was
basic adolescent scare tactics. As a result
I ended up in an inpatient clinic for
teenagers for about five months. Almost
everybody there was there because they
ran away or they were doing a lot of
drugs. The second time was a couple of
years ago. I did a Valium overdose. It
wasn't very serious—I just had to have
my stomach pumped.

This time it shocked me to realize
what could have happened to me. I real-
ized how much I had hurt my friends
and family, which I didn’t think about
before. I started wondering if people
could trust me. It upset my life a lot—it
threw everything backwards. Jonathan
flew in from California. He said the scar-
iest part was worrying about having to
decide what to do if my body kept living
but I had no brain response. When I first
woke up IJ didn’t think there would be
anything wrong with me. And then it
hit me that I couldn’t move. I was em-
barrassed that people had to see me like
that.

Once you're out of the hospital a lot
of institutions won't hire you. You can’t
get health insurance. You have to lie on
your job applications. People look at you
like you’re dangerous. It’s real scary for
some of my friends—they think they’re
responsible. Trying to convince people
that I was OK was the hardest thing.
That they didn’t have to watch over me,
that I wasn’t going to try it again.

Thomas, a hairdresser, 21 years old:

I tried it five years ago. I was at a neigh-
bor’s house and fired a gun at my head.
Nothing happened; it seemed empty. I
fired it at a wall and put a bullet in it. So

204

very few requests for suicide. People want to be

relieved of pain, which we could do for nearly
everyone if we were given good hospice and
palliative care. We need to be sure we've guar-
anteed mercy living before we get around to
mercy killing.”

Anyway, I suspect suicidal people are auto-
matically rescued not for their own sakes, but
for the rest of us. A suicide death, unless it is
rationally prepared for, devastates. The mes-
sage of a suicide attempt is often: Death is bet-
ter than the pain you've caused me. And the
message doesn’t have to come from someone
you know. David Gruder, who directed crisis
hotlines, told me about a woman who called
up and raved: “I’ve had it. I’m pissed off. ’m
killing myself and damned if I’m not going to
take someone else with me and you, you bas-
tard, are coming.” BANG! She shot herself.
And, as it happened, it was the hotline work-
er’s first call. She went right into a nervous
breakdown.

But I believe the main reason a suicide at-
tempt devastates and fascinates us is it reminds
us how fragile our own hold on life is. “Here I
am struggling along with my problems,” Mi-
chael Simpson said, “‘and here’s a guy who’s
given up. Is it possible I’m wrong in bothering
so hard to try to live? Once you start discussing
suicide you’re asking what the grounds are for
killing ourselves. The other side of that ques-
tion is, ‘What am I living for?’ That’s an ugly
question for most of us because we don’t usu-
ally know.”

If someone you know is thinking of suicide, or
you think they are, and you don’t want them
to die, tell them. “Please call me or call suicide
prevention before you try anything because I
care about you and I don’t want you to die.”
Don’t argue with them about why life is worth
living, because you can’t win that one in ra-
tional argument. Tell them how you and other
people will feel when they’re gone. If there are
mental health services you trust in your neigh-
borhood, you may want to suggest them.

If you are scared you may commit suicide,
and sometimes you don’t want to, there may
be more options than you realize. A good

How Not to Commit Suicide

guide to whatever mental health services are
around and how to find them is You Are Not
Alone (Next Whole Earth Catalog, p. 327): It’s
worth looking around to see if there’s a friend,
family member, or neighbor that you can talk
to about it. Even if, like me, you distrust men-

tal health services, it’s probably worth calling

suicide prevention. They’re listed under that
name in the phone book white pages, or call
the American Association of Suicidology at
(303) 692—0985 for the phone number of one
near you.

If you want to make someone pay attention
to you through a suicide attempt, you might
consider leaving a note for that person and

_ checking into an emergency room and telling

them you're suicidal. You'll go through the
same psychiatric hold, but without the damage
to your body. Choose your emergency room

_ carefully. Some, like Herrick Hospital in

Berkeley, often have eight- or ten-hour waits

for noncritical patients, in dismal surround-

ings that will probably make you feel worse.
Or, have you considered changing your life?

a minute later I found some Seconals in a
medicine cabinet. I remember watching
cartoons and taking the pills one by one.
A neighbor lady found me and couldn’t
wake me up. I couldn’t open my eyes or
move, but I heard everything. I remem-
ber the lady shaking me and saying,
“Oh, my God.” I remember the ambul-
ance people taking off my clothes and
making me throw up. There wasn’t any
pain. I don’t remember having my stom-
ach pumped.

When I woke up it was five days later.
A big black lady kept tickling me.
“Bout time you woke up,” she said.
“T’ve been tickling you for three days.” I
thought I was in heaven—it looked like
some place in heaven for the misfits.
Turned out I was in the basement of a
free clinic, a long room with rows of
beds with all kinds of teenagers, preg-
nant girls, suicides, drug addicts. We
walked around in gowns, smoking ciga-
rettes and watching TV. The reason I
tried was I was angry at my mother, but
when she came in she just said, “Why'd
you do this—to try to get attention?”

Am I glad I was rescued? Oh, yeah. I
was so glad I didn’t die. It made me re-
alize how much I appreciated myself, be-
cause I had a glimpse of what I might
have lost. I had some friends and I
would’ve missed them. I didn’t have to
go home after that. They put me ina
foster home. The State made me go toa
psychiatrist. I never liked the man. I
thought he had more problems than I
did. I felt drugged and slow for a couple
of years. Every now and then I’d take
speed to feel normal. Downers still make
me feel speedy. If I had a suicidal friend
now I’d ask them, “Why don’t you have
any alternatives? Could it really be so
awful?” That’s what I say to myself now.

205

PAT, CALITELA

Feminism and
Sadomasochism

From the original introduction
(Spring 1982):
This article . . . deals with the ob-
jections some feminists have to S/M.
However, the biggest problems in a
sadomasochist’s life are not caused by
the bigotry of some members of the
women’s movement. We are far more
concerned about the vicious harass-
ment, imprisonment, and vio-
lence we face from the state and its
agents—especially the vice squads of
local police departments. The bulk
of prejudice against sadomasochism
does not come from feminism. It
comes from organized religion, psy-
chiatry, and others who promulgate
Judeo-Christian morality. This arti-
cle is an attempt to reach an audience
that is potentially more educable
than the people and institutions who
are genuinely responsible for sexual
repression. Despite the shortcomings
of some segments of the women’s
movement, I remain a firm supporter
of the basic goals of feminism. . . .
Pat Califia

We had an article by Ivan Illich
called “Vernacular Gender,” about

206

how industrialization had corrupted
men’s and women’s work-roles. We
had “What to Name the Children’ —
strategies for when husband and wife
keep their own names. It looked like
we were accruing material toward a
CQ issue on gender. Then Stephanie
Mills spotted this article in a feminist
magazine called Heresies.

I happen to think this is one of the
best articles COEVOLUTION has ever
published. Many CQ readers felt it
was one of the worst—reacting, as
you might guess, against the sado-
masochism rather than the femin-
ism. “What about the producers of
snuff films?” asked one letter. “Will
they be next in line to be sanc-
tioned?” Another letter said, “By
presenting an article that is favorable
towards sadomasochism, you culti-
vate thought, tilling the ground
where the seed of violence can grow.”
Other readers felt sadomasochism
was just one more decadent Califor-
nia perversion, out of touch with
real-world needs like children, food
and shelter, and local communities.

Other readers responded to those
letters, saying that S/M may bea
peacemaking release of the same feel-
ings that otherwise contribute to-
ward real violence; that we judge
without understanding if we don’t
hear the story as told by the people
who live the story; that S/M as Pat
describes it is a form of play, and
most people are generally too quick
to condemn forms of play that they
don’t share (including play-con-
demning, I’m sure).

Feminism and Sadomasochism

Who is Pat Califia? In Stephanie
Mills’ words written in 1982: “{She}
is a working-class kid from a Mor-
mon background. Her father was a
construction worker and the family
moved around a lot. . . . [Now] she
lives with a woman lover in an open

_ relationship. She makes quilts, reads

science fiction, and has a cat. She be-
lieves that “You don’t have to be anti-
pornography to be feminist’ and has
been a feminist for ten years. In ad-

_ dition to that, she has done work on

antiwar issues and low-income hous-
ing. ‘I do more than sex,’ she says.
‘I’m a rad.’ Pat is the news editor of
the Advocate, the largest gay news-

_ magazine in the United States, and a

freelance writer.” Since then, Pat has
moved to New York, from where she

_ writes the “Advisor” column for the

Advocate.
You can read the History Appen-
dix (p.331) for a blow-by-blow de-

_ scription of the aftermath of this

article.
Art Kleiner

Three years ago, I decided to stop ignoring my
sexual fantasies. Since the age of two, I had

_ been constructing a private world of domi-

nance, submission, punishment, and pain.

_ Abstinence, consciousness-raising, and therapy

had not blighted the charm of these frightful

| reveries. I could not tolerate any more guilt,

anxiety, or frustration, so I cautiously began to

| experiment with real sadomasochism. I did not
_ lose my soul in the process. But in those three
_ years, I lost a lover, several friends, a publisher,

my apartment, and my good name because of

_ the hostility and fear evoked by my openness
about my true sexuality.

Writing this article is painful because it
brings back the outrage and hurt I felt at being
ostracized from the lesbian feminist commu-
nity. I’ve been a feminist since I was thirteen

and a lesbian since I was seventeen. I didn’t

lose just a ghetto or a subculture—lesbian

_ feminism was the matrix I used to become an

|

1124110) aa] Kauo Hy hq 50104q

Pat Califia, feminist and sadomasochist

adult. Fortunately for my sanity and happi-
ness, I managed to construct a new social
network. My friends and lovers are bisexual
women (some of whom do S/M professionally),
gay and bisexual men, and other outlaw lesbi-
ans. If I were isolated, I would not be strong
enough to speak out about something that
makes me this vulnerable.

I describe my feelings about this issue be-
cause sadomasochism is usually dealt with in
an abstract, self-righteous way by feminist
theorists who believe it is the epitome of miso-
gyny, sexism, and violence. In this article I
shall examine sadomasochism in a theoretical
way, and attempt a rapprochement between
feminism and S/M. But I am motivated by my
concern for the people who are frightened or
ashamed of their erotic response to sadomaso-
chistic fantasies. I don’t want to hear any more
tragic stories from women who have repressed
their own sexuality because they think that’s
the only politically acceptable way to deal with
a yearning for helplessness or sexual control. I

207

Pat Califia

don’t believe that any more than I believe ho-
mosexuals should be celibate so they can con-
tinue to be good Catholics. The women’s
movement has become a moralistic force, and
it can contribute to the self-loathing and mis-
ery experienced by sexual minorities. Because
sexual dissenters are already being trampled on
by monolithic, prudish institutions, I think it
is time the women’s movement started taking
more radical positions on sexual issues.

It is difficult to discuss sadomasochism in
feminist terms because some of the slang S/M
people use to talk about our sexuality has been
appropriated by feminist propagandists. Terms
like “roles,” “masochism,” “bondage,” “domi-
nance,” and ‘“‘submission” have become buzz-
words. Their meanings in a feminist context
differ sharply from their significance to S/M
people. The discussion is rendered even more
difficult because feminist theorists do not do
their homework on human sexuality before
pronouncing judgment on a sexual variation.
Like Victorian missionaries in Polynesia, they
insist on interpreting the sexual behavior of
other people according to their own value sys-
tems. A perfect example of this is the “debate”
over transsexuality. In its present form, femin-
ism is not necessarily the best theoretical
framework for understanding sexual deviation,
just as unmodified Marxism is an inadequate
system for analyzing the oppression of women.

Since the label “feminist” has become de-
based coinage, let me explain why I call myself
a feminist. I believe that the society I live in is
a patriarchy, with power concentrated in the
hands of men, and that this patriarchy actively
prevents women from becoming complete and
independent human beings. Women are op-
pressed by being denied access to economic re-
sources, political power, and control over their
own reproduction. This oppression is managed
by several institutions, chiefly the family, reli-
gion, and the state. An essential part of the
oppression of women is control over sexual ide-
ology, mythology, and behavior. This social
control affects the sexual nonconformist as well
as the conformist. Because our training in con-
ventional sexuality begins the minute we are
born and because the penalties for rebellion are

> 66

208

so high, no individual or group is completely
free from erotic tyranny.

I am not a separatist. I believe that men can
be committed to the destruction of the patriar-
chy. After all, the rewards of male dominance
are given only to men who perpetuate and co-
operate with the system. I am not ““woman-
identified’ —i.e., I do not believe that women
have more insight, intuition, virtue, identifi-
cation with the earth, or love in their genes
than men. Consequently, I cannot support
everything women do, and I believe the wom-
en’s movement could learn a lot from politi-
cized or deviant men. On the other hand, I do
not find it easy to work with men, partly be-
cause male feminist theory is pitifully under-
developed. I do not think separatism is worth-
less or bankrupt. It can be useful as an orga-
nizing strategy and teaches women valu-
able survival skills. The taste of autonomy that
separatism provides is intoxicating, and can be
a powerful incentive to struggle for real
freedom.

I think it is imperative that feminists dis-
mantle the institutions that foster the exploita-
tion and abuse of women. The family, conven-
tional sexuality, and gender are at the top of
my hit list. These institutions control the
emotional, intimate lives of every one of us,
and they have done incalculable damage to
women. I cannot imagine how such drastic
change can be accomplished without armed
struggle, the appropriation and reallocation of
wealth, and a change in the ownership of the
means of production. When women are liber-
ated, women will probably cease to exist, since
our whole structure of sex and gender must
undergo a complete transformation.

The term sadomasochism has also been de-
based, primarily by the mass media, clinical
psychology, and the antipornography move-
ment. After all, homophobia is not the only
form of sexual prejudice. Every minority sexual
behavior has been mythologized and distorted.
There is a paucity of accurate, explicit, non-
judgmental information about sex in modern
America. This is one way sexual behavior is
controlled. If people don’t know a particular
technique or lifestyle exists, they aren’t likely

Feminism and Sadomasochism

to try it. If the only images they have of a cer-
tain sexual act are ugly, disgusting, or threat-
ening, they will either not engage in that act
or be furtive about enjoying it.

Since there is so much confusion about what
S/M is, I want to describe my own sexual spe-
cialties and the sadomasochistic subculture. I
am basically a sadist. About ten percent of the
time, I take the other role (bottom, slave, ma-
sochist). This makes me atypical, since the
majority of women and men involved in S/M
prefer to play bottom. I enjoy leathersex, bond-
age, various forms of erotic torture, flagella-
tion (whipping), verbal humiliation, fistfuck-
ing, and watersports (playing with enemas and
piss). I do not enjoy oral sex unless I am receiv-
ing it as a form of sexual service, which means
my partner must be on her knees, on her back,
or at least in a collar. I have non-S/M sex rarely,
mostly for old times’ sake, with vanilla
friends* I want to stay close to. My primary re-
lationship is with a woman who enjoys being
my slave. We enjoy tricking with other people
and telling each other the best parts afterward.

Because sadomasochism is usually portrayed
as a violent, dangerous activity, most people
do not think there is a great deal of difference
between a rapist and a bondage enthusiast. Sa-
domasochism is not a form of sexual assault. It
is a consensual activity that involves polarized
roles and intense sensations. An S/M scene is
always preceded by a negotiation in which the
top and bottom decide whether or not they
will play, what activities are likely to occur,
what activities will not occur, and about how
long the scene will last. The bottom is usually
given a ‘‘safe word” or “code action”’ she can
use to stop the scene. This safe word allows the
bottom to enjoy a fantasy that the scene is not
consensual, and to protest verbally or resist
physically without halting stimulation.

The key word to understanding S/M is fan-
tasy. The roles, dialogue, fetish costumes, and
sexual activity are part of a drama or ritual.
The participants are enhancing their sexual

* Vanilla is to S/M what straight is to gay. I don’t use the
term as a pejorative but because I believe sexual prefer-
ences are more like flavor preferences than like moral/po-
litical alliances.

pleasure, not damaging or imprisoning one an-
other. A sadomasochist is well aware that a role
adopted during a scene is not appropriate dur-
ing other interactions and that a fantasy role is
not the sum total of her being.

S/M relationships are usually egalitarian.
Very few bottoms want a full-time mistress. In
fact, the stubbornness and aggressiveness of
the masochist is a byword in the S/M commu-
nity. Tops often make nervous jokes about
being slaves to the whims of their bottoms.
After all, the top’s pleasure is dependent on the
bottom’s willingness to play. This gives most
sadists a mild-to-severe case of performance
anxiety.

The S/M subculture is a theater in which
sexual dramas can be acted out and appreci-
ated. It also serves as a vehicle for passing on
new fantasies, new equipment, warnings about
police harassment, introductions to potential
sex partners and friends, and safety informa-
tion. Safety is a major concern of sadomasoch-
ists. A major part of the sadist’s turn-on con-
sists of deliberately altering the emotional or
physical state of the bottom. Even a minor
accident like a rope burn can upset the top
enough to mar the scene. And, of course, a
bottom can’t relax and enjoy the sex if she
doesn’t completely trust her top. The S/M
community makes some attempt to regulate
itself by warning newcomers away from indi-
viduals who are inconsiderate, insensitive,
prone to playing when they are intoxicated, or
unsafe for other reasons. The suppression of
S/M isolates novice sadists and masochists from
this body of information, which can make
playing more rewarding and minimize danger.

For some people, the fact that S/M is con-
sensual makes it acceptable. They may not un-
derstand why people enjoy it, but they begin
to see that S/M people are not inhumane mon-
sters. For other people, including many femin-
ists, the fact that it is consensual makes it even
more appalling. A woman who deliberately
seeks out a sexual situation in which she can be
helpless is a traitor in their eyes. Hasn't the
women’s movement been trying to persuade
people for years that women are not naturally
masochistic?

209

Pat Califia

Originally, this meant that women do not
create their own second-class status, do not en-
joy it, and are the victims of socially con-
structed discrimination, not biology. A sexual
masochist probably doesn’t want to be raped,
battered, discriminated against on her job, or
kept down by the system. Her desire to act out
a specific sexual fantasy is very different from
the pseudopsychiatric dictum that a woman’s
world is bound by housework, intercourse, and
childbirth.

Some feminists object to the description of
S/M as consensual. They believe that our soci-
ety has conditioned all of us to accept inequi-
ties in power and hierarchical relationships.
Therefore, S/M is simply a manifestation of the
same system that dresses girls in pink and boys
in blue, allows surplus value to accumulate in
the coffers of capitalists and gives workers a
minimum wage, and sends cops out to keep
the disfranchised down.

It is true, as I stated before, that society
shapes sexuality. We can make any decision
about our sexual behavior we like, but our
imagination and ability to carry out those deci-
sions are limited by the surrounding culture.
But I do not believe that sadomasochism is the
result of institutionalized injustice to a greater
extent than heterosexual marriage, lesbian
bars, or gay male bathhouses. The system is
unjust because it assigns privileges based on
race, gender, and social class. During an S/M
encounter, the participants select a particular
role because it best expresses their sexual
needs, how they feel about a particular partner,
or which outfit is clean and ready to wear. The
most significant reward for being a top or a
bottom is sexual pleasure. If you don’t like
being a top or a bottom, you switch your keys.
Try doing that with your biological sex or your
race or your socioeconomic status. The S/M
subculture is affected by sexism, racism, and
other fallout from the system, but the dynamic
between a top and a bottom is quite different
from the dynamic between men and women,
whites and Blacks, or upper- and working-
class people. The roles are acquired and used in
very different ways.

Some feminists still find S/M roles disturb-

210

ing, because they believe they are derived from
genuinely oppressive situations. They accuse
sadomasochism of being fascistic because of
the symbolism employed to create an S/M am-
biance. And some S/M people do enjoy fanta-
sies that are more elaborate than a simple
structure of top versus bottom. An S/M scene
can be played out using the personae of guard
and prisoner, cop and suspect, Nazi and Jew,
white and Black, straight man and queer, par-
ent and child, priest and penitent, teacher and
student, whore and client, etc.

However, no symbol has a single meaning.
Its meaning is derived from the context in
which it is used. Not everyone who wears a
swastika is a Nazi, not everyone who has a pair
of handcuffs on his belt is a cop, and not every-
one who wears a nun’s habit is a Catholic. S/M
is more a parody of the hidden sexual nature of
fascism than it is a worship of or acquiescence
to it. How many real Nazis, cops, priests, or
teachers would be involved in a kinky sexual
scene? It is also a mistake to assume that the
historical oppressor is always the top in an S/M
encounter. The child may be chastising the
parent, the prisoner may have turned the tables
on the cop, and the queer may be forcing the
straight man to confront his sexual response to
other men. The dialogue in some S/M scenes
may sound sexist or homophobic from the out-
side, but its real meaning is probably neither.
A top can call his bottom a cocksucker to give
him an instruction (i.e., indicate that the top
wants oral stimulation), encourage him to lose
his inhibition and perform an act he may be
afraid of, or simply acknowledge shame and
guilt and use it to enhance the sex act rather
than prevent it.

S/M eroticism focuses on whatever feelings
or actions are forbidden, and searches for a way
to obtain pleasure from the forbidden. It is the
quintessence of nonreproductive sex. Those
feminists who accuse sadomasochists of mock-
ing the oppressed by playing with dominance
and submission forget that we are oppressed.
We suffer police harassment, violence in the
street, discrimination in housing and in em-
ployment. We are not treated the way our sys-
tem treats its collaborators and supporters.

—

Feminism and Sadomasochism

The issue of pain is probably as difficult for

feminists to understand as polarized roles. We
_ tend to associate pain with illness or self-de-

_ struction. First of all, S/M does not necessarily
_ involve pain. The exchange of power is more

_ essential to S/M than intense sensation, pun-

| ishment, or discipline. Second, pain is a sub-
jective experience. Depending on the context,
_acertain sensation may frighten you, make you
_ angry, urge you on, or get you hot. People

' choose to endure pain or discomfort if the goal
_ they are striving for makes it worthwhile.
Long-distance runners are not generally

_ thought of as sex perverts, nor is Mother

| Theresa. The fact that masochism is disap-

| proved of when stressful athletic activity and
religious martyrdom are not is an interesting

) example of the way sex is made a special case in
_ our society. We seem to be incapable of using

_ the same reason and compassion we apply to

_ non-sexual issues to formulate our positions on
| sexual issues.

S/M violates a taboo that preserves the mys-

| ticism of romantic sex. Any pain involved is

| deliberate. Aroused human beings do not see,
smell, hear, taste, or perceive pain as acutely as
_ the nonaroused individual. Lots of people find
_ bruises or scratches the morning after an exhil-
arating session of lovemaking and can’t re-

_ member exactly how or when they got them.

| The sensations involved in S/M are not that

different. But we’re supposed to fall into bed

/ and do it with our eyes closed. Good, enthu-

siastic sex is supposed to happen automatically
between people who love each other. If the sex
is less than stunning, we tend to blame the

_ quality of our partner’s feelings for us. Plan-

ning a sexual encounter and using toys or
equipment to produce specific feelings seems

_ antithetical to romance.

What looks painful to an observer is proba-
bly being perceived as pleasure, heat, pressure,
or a mixture of all these by the masochist. A
good top builds sensation slowly, alternates
pain with pleasure, rewards endurance with
more pleasure, and teaches the bottom to tran-
scend her own limits. With enough prepara-
tion, care, and encouragement, people are ca-
pable of doing wonderful things. There is a

special pride which results from doing some-
thing unique and extraordinary for your lover.
The sadomasochist has a passion for making
use of the entire body, every nerve fiber, and
every wayward thought.

Recently, I have heard feminists use the
term “‘fetishistic’”’ as an epithet and a synonym
for “objectifying.” Sadomasochists are often
accused of substituting things for people, of
loving the leather or rubber or spike heels more
than the person who is wearing them. Objecti-
fication originally referred to the use of images
of stereotypically feminine women to sell prod-
ucts like automobiles and cigarettes. It also re-
ferred to the sexual harassment of women and
the notion that we should be available to pro-
vide men with sexual gratification without re-
ceiving pleasure in return and without the
right to refuse to engage in sex. A concept
which was originally used to attack the mar-
keting campaigns of international corporations
and the sexual repression of women is now
being used to attack a sexual minority.

Fetish costumes are worn privately or at S/M
gatherings. They are as unacceptable to em-
ployers and advertising executives as a woman
wearing overalls and smoking a cigar. Rather
than being part of the sexual repression of
women, fetish costumes can provide the
women who wear them with sexual pleasure
and power. Even when a fetish costume exag-
gerates the masculine or feminine attributes of
the wearer, it cannot properly be called sexist.
Our society strives to make masculinity in men
and femininity in women appear natural and
biologically determined. Fetish costumes vio-
late this rule by being too theatrical and delib-
erate. Since fetish costumes may also be used to
transform the gender of the wearer, they are a
further violation of sexist standards for sex-spe-
cific dress and conduct.

The world is not divided into people who
have sexual fetishes and people who don’t.
There is a continuum of response to certain ob-
jects, substances, and parts of the body. Very
few people are able to enjoy sex with anyone,
regardless of their appearance. Much fetishism
probably passes as ‘‘normal” sexuality because
the required cues are so common and easy to

2t

Pat Califia

obtain that no one notices how necessary they
are.

Human sexuality is a complicated phenome-
non. A cursory examination will not yield the
entire significance of a sexual act. Fetishes have
several qualities which make them erotically
stimulating and unacceptable to the majority
culture. Wearing leather, rubber, or a silk ki-
mono distributes feeling over the entire skin.
The isolated object may become a source of
arousal. This challenges the identification of
sex with the genitals. Fetishes draw all the sen-
ses into the sexual experience, especially the
senses of smell and touch. Since they are often
anachronistic or draw attention to erogenous
zones, fetish costumes cannot be worn on the
street. Fetishes are reserved for sexual use only,
yet they are drawn from realms not tradition-
ally associated with sexuality. Fetishism is the
product of imagination and technology.

Sadomasochism is also accused of being a
hostile or angry kind of sex, as opposed to the
gentle and loving kind of sex that feminists
should strive for. The women’s movement has
become increasingly pro romantic love in the
last decade. Lesbians are especially prone to
this sentimental trend. Rather than being crit-
ical of the idea that one can find enough fulfill-
ment ina relationship to justify one’s exis-
tence, feminists are seeking membership in a
perfect, egalitarian couple. I question the value
of this.

There is no concrete evidence that the child-
hoods of sadomasochists contained any more
corporal punishment, puritanism, or abuse
than the childhoods of other people. There is
also no evidence that we secretly fear and hate
our partners. S/M relationships vary from no
relationship at all (the S/M is experienced dur-
ing fantasy or masturbation) to casual sex with
many partners to monogamous couples, and
include all shades in between. There are many
different ways to express affection or sexual in-
terest. Vanilla people send flowers, poetry, or
candy, or they exchange rings. S/M people do
all that, and may also lick boots, wear a locked
collar, or build their loved one a rack in the
basement. There is little objective difference
between a feminist who is offended by the fact

22

that my lover kneels to me in public and sub-
urbanites calling the cops because the gay boys
next door are sunbathing in the nude. My sex-
ual semiotics differ from the mainstream. So
what? I didn’t join the feminist movement to
live inside a Hallmark greeting card.

Is there a single controversial sexual issue
that the women’s movement has not reacted to
with a conservative, feminine horror of the
outrageous and the rebellious? A movement
that started out saying biology is not destiny is
trashing transsexuals and celebrating women’s
“natural” connection to the earth and living
things. A movement that spawned children’s
liberation is trashing boy-lovers and support-
ing the passage of draconian sex laws that as-
sign heavier sentences for having sex witha
minor than you’d get for armed robbery. A
movement that developed an analysis of house-
work as unpaid labor and acknowledged that
women usually trade sex for what they want
because that’s all they’ve got is joining the vice
squad to get prostitutes off the street. A move-
ment whose early literature was often called
obscene and banned from circulation is cam-
paigning to get rid of pornography. The only
sex perverts this movement stands behind are
lesbian mothers, and I suspect that’s because of
the current propaganda about women being
the nurturing, healing force that will save the
world from destructive male energy.

Lesbianism is being desexualized as fast as
movement dykes can apply the whitewash. We
are no longer demanding that feminist organi-
zations acknowledge their lesbian member-
ship. We are pretending that the words femin-
ist and woman are synonyms for /esbian.

The antipornography movement is the best
of the worst of the women’s movement, and it
must take responsibility for much of the big-
otry circulating in the feminist community.
This movement has consistently refused to take
strong public positions supporting sex educa-
tion, consenting-adult legislation, the right to
privacy, the decriminalization of prostitution,
children’s and adolescents’ rights to sexual in-
formation and freedom, and the First Amend-
ment. It has encouraged violence against sex-
ual minorities, especially sadomasochists, by

Feminism and Sadomasochism

slandering sexual deviation as violence against

. women. Their view of S/M is derived from one

genre of commercial pornography (male-domi-
nant and female-submissive) and makes Krafft-
Ebing look like a liberal.

Commercial pornography distorts all forms
of sexual behavior. There are several reasons for
this. One is that it is designed to make money,
not to educate people to be aesthetically pleas-
ing. The other is that it is quasi-legal, and
thus must be produced as quickly and surrepti-

_tiously as possible. Another reason is that

erotic material is intended to gratify fantasy,
not serve as a model for actual behavior.

S/M pornography can be divided into several
types, each designed for a different segment

_ of the S/M subculture. Most of it represents

women dominating and disciplining men,
since the largest market for S/M porn is hetero-
sexual submissive males. Very little S/M porn
shows any actual physical damage or even im-
plies that damage is occurring. Most of it de-
picts bondage, or tops dressed in fetish cos-
tumes and assuming threatening poses.

Very little S/M porn is well produced or in-

_ formative. But eliminating it will have the ef-
_ fect of further impoverishing S/M culture and

isolating sadomasochists from one another,
since many of us make contact via personal ads
carried in pornographic magazines. The excuse
for banning “violent” porn is that this will end
violence against women. The causal connection
is dubious. It is indisputably true that very few
people who consume pornography ever assault
or rape another person. When a rape or assault
is committed, it usually occurs after some fore-
thought and planning. But legally, a free soci-
ety must distinguish between the fantasy or
thought of committing a crime and the actual
crime. It is not a felony to fantasize commit-
ting an illegal act, and it should not be, unless
we want our morals regulated by the Brain Po-
lice. Banning S/M porn is the equivalent of
making fantasy a criminal act. Violence
against women will not be reduced by increas-
ing sexual repression. People desperately need
better information about sex; more humanistic
and attractive erotica; more readily available
birth control, abortion, and sex therapy; and

more models for nontraditional, nonexploita-
tive relationships.

I am often asked if sadomasochism will sur-
vive the revolution. I think all the labels and
categories we currently use to describe our-
selves will change dramatically in the next 100
years, even if the revolution does not occur. My
fantasy is that kinkiness and sexual variation

25>

Pat Califia

will multiply, not disappear, if terrible penal-
ties are no longer meted out for being sexually
adventurous.

There is an assumption behind the question
that bothers me. The assumption that sadoma-
sochists are part of the system rather than part
of the rebellion has already been dealt with in
this article. But there is another assumption—
that we must enjoy being oppressed and mis-
treated. We like to wear uniforms? Then we
must get off on having cops bust up our bars.
We like to play with whips and nipple clamps
and hot wax? Then it must turn us on when

214

gangs of kids hunt us down, harass and beat
us. We're not really human. We’re just a
bunch of leather jackets and spike heels, a
bunch of post office boxes at the bottom of
sex ads.

We make you uncomfortable, partly because
we're sexual, and partly because we’re not so
different. I'd like to know when you’re going
to quit blaming us, the victims of sexual
repression, for the oppression of women. I’d
like to know when you’re going to quit objec-
tifying us.

| WILL BAKER

The Legend of
Great Uncle Jim

and the Woman

Behind It All

From the original introduction

_ (Spring 1982):

This contribution [Will Baker} calls
his “first attempt at bareknuckle
gonzo journalism. It is all true, and
that is often a bad sign.” In sending
this story of losing at love, he won-
dered if one ought to talk about such
things in front of strangers. O yes. It
saves them from thinking that their
deep misery (inevitable with a jilt;
man or woman, it hurts like dying)
is unique. The backdrop for this true
tale is Nevada—wide open, weird,
and just the place to get married or
divorced in a hell of a hurry.
Stephanie Mills

Who is Will Baker? For the appear-
ance of his story “Left Over in Your
Heart,” which ran in the Summer
1977 CQ, Anne Herbert wrote an in-
troduction that said little more than
“Will Baker exists.” Well, maybe a

little more—it said that he teaches
writing and film at the University of
California, Davis, that he raises rab-
bits and almonds, and that he has
written a novel, Dawnstone (Capra
Press). All of this is still true, plus
Will has a 1984 book from North
Atlantic Books called Backward: An
Essay on Indians, Time, and
Photography.

Art Kleiner

The lady in rhinestone glasses at the Winner’s
Inn wasn’t just sure how you got to Tuscarora.
She knew it was eighty miles from downtown
Winnemucca, and believed there was pave-
ment as far as Golconda, but after that it was
all back roads, and likely no signs. I should ask
at the hardware store, where they had county
maps.

The hardware lady—clean Levi’s, hair dyed
jet black, an evergreen smell—helped me to
find the right map. Elko County is about the
size of Delaware, and appears to be mostly
back roads. The roads run in long and lone-
some lines through immense sagebrush basins
bounded by worn but impressive mountains.

The region is inhabited mainly by jackrab-
bits and jet fighters, with an occasional far-off
peg of a man aboard a horse. Sometimes in the
basins there is a slate-green river (forks of the
Owyhee or Humboldt); sometimes a wide,
shallow lake; sometimes a mirage. Ranches
hereabouts run from little ones of five thousand
acres to good-sized spreads of one hundred
thousand acres or more. From a rise in the road
you occasionally see one: a distant clump of
poplars, not bright green but at least different,

215

Will Baker

maybe a glitter of aluminum from a trailer.
What you will see mostly is rabbits.

Before the ranches were the mines. All over
the map you can see the little crossed picks and
shovels: Old Timer’s, Silver Cloud, Midas, Lit-
tle Jewel. Tuscarora was the biggest in the
whole northeast corner of the state until 1904
when the price of silver and the depth of the
shafts didn’t figure out right, and they began
to pull the pumps and let the water take over.
At one time the population was given as ten
thousand—probably on the high side the way
all miner’s estimates are—but it was mostly
tents, a little wood and less brick. Now the
hardware lady guessed twenty people might be
living there, but no motel, no store, not evena
bar, and the road was one of those checkered
lines identified as a ‘‘gravel road, not graded or
drained.” Might be tricky this season, she said.
They’d been seeing some rain up there. A
Volvo? Maybe. She looked vaguely
encouraging.

The mountains were shrouded in high mist
and light squalls were blowing through when I
took the Golconda exit. Gray rain. And rain-
ing also in my heart—to embroider a little
C & W on the edge of this tale—since I left
Reno, where the dark-eyed waitress at Harrah’s
said it was a good pass and she would have been
more than happy to consider it but she had
plans after work to catch the tail end of Charlie
Daniels’ last set, and next week when Willie
Nelson went through it was the day before her
birthday and she had a date with her dad. I
wondered if I was still younger than her dad
and told her again about her smile and ordered
another whiskey, because there was some
chance, maybe a good chance, she was lying.

I hadn’t planned this essay in historical re-
search at all this way. It was just a loose chip
from my childhood, an Ancient Mariner charm
or virus that I picked up, listening by the
woodbox while my dad and my uncle Jess told
the story of Great Uncle Jim, the family’s only
honest-to-God straight-up-and-down hero.

Of course they also told bear stories, and tried
to figure out how the Bakers were related to
Quannah Parker’s Comanches, and retold their
own father’s exploits as a cowpuncher on the

216

Chisholm Trail. But the saga of Uncle Jim in
Tuscarora was the big story, I could see that.
They told it more often and they told it differ-
ently. Still in his galluses and ironpants, smell-
ing of pitch from a day in the woods, my father
would lean forward and grip his knees in his
big-knuckled hands and shout at my uncle.

“A big man by God.”

“Mountain of a man.” Jess always spoke as if
dad had gotten it wrong.

“He did for that sonofabitch.”

Jess would snort and look away into the ceil-
ing. “Did for him? Jesus Christ, did for him?
Cut his goddamned head off, is what he did.”

And so they would go back and argue over
the whole thing again. How Jim had been
carving on the hitching post with the clasp
knife, how the other had approached, what
they had most likely said, whether the other
man had shot Jim in the alley or in the base-
ment under the saloon, and on and on.

I knew other stories like that. In fact once
dad had come in from fighting fire to tell my
awestruck mother that a trail boss, one of the
Reed boys, had shot one of the loggers who
got drunk and came for him with an axe. That
didn’t kill him though, dad observed in some
disgust, it was the other dumb drunk sonsof-
bitches who tried to pack him out and didn’t
know how.

But Great Uncle Jim was different because
he was our own blood. He wasn’t in any pic-
ture books, or famous anywhere else, but he
was all ours. My grandfather had known him
personally. He was a big man, a mountain of a
man, strong as a bull, and he died full of lead
with his boots on. At that age I read a lot of
Zane Grey and trashier stuff as well, and it was
easy for me to elaborate on the skeletal ballad
my dad and uncle were chanting. I could see
Big Jim in my mind’s eye, see the street, the
dustdevils and tumbleweed, the weatherbeaten
buildings, the horses shying and stomping in
apprehension.

Some of the details made me uncomfortable,
and to myself I fudged around them to get the
heroic action I needed. It seemed to me Uncle
Jim should have a gun too, a blazing gun, and
they should walk up the middle of the main

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

street toward each other, saying finally, “All

_ right you dirty sidewinding —————.,, go for
_ your iron!” or the like. But it wasn’t like that,

I really knew. It was surely much more like the
Lovelock Tribune had it in their edition of June
6, 1909:

Shot Through the Head

He Mustered Sufficient
Strength to Sever
His Opponent’s Head
With a Knife

In one of the bloodiest battles ever
recorded in the annals of the state,
James Baker and Clyde Thompson,
two residents of Tuscarora, fought to
their death Sunday night about 8
o'clock.

There were no witnesses to the
awful affray—the men fighting their
battle alone. After the fight, Baker
alone remained alive, and from him
the meager particulars obtainable
were received.

The two men met on the street
and angry words passed between
them. Challenges were issued and
accepted and the men went into an
alley away from the gaze of chance
passers-by, to settle their grievances.
Very soon four shots, fired from a
pistol in the hands of Thompson
rang out, and Baker fell to the
ground badly wounded, one of the
shots taking effect in the head and
two in the abdomen. Although
wounded unto death, Baker man-
aged to arise and grappled his assail-

ant. The men wrestled and fought
until Thompson fell to the ground
with Baker on top. Baker then man-
aged to take from his pocket an or-
dinary pocket knife and with this
weapon he inflicted frightful injuries
upon Thompson. In an awful frenzy,
maddened by the fearful pain he was
suffering, and with his strength fast
ebbing away, Baker held Thompson
while he wielded his knife across his
throat. When Baker had finished his
butchery, Thompson was practically
dead with his throat cut from ear to
ear. A later inspection of the remains
of Thompson, who died immediately
after receiving the wounds, revealed
a ghastly spectacle. It was found that
the head was almost entirely severed
from the body.

Baker and Thompson came from
Texas a couple of years ago and had
been living in Tusacarora and in that
vicinity ever since. Baker was a mar-
ried man and at the time of the affray
his wife was visiting in Elko.

Both men were well known by a
number of people in Lovelock. Baker
has been in and out of here for the
past year. He was a large, raw-boned
man and had a glass eye, and was
built on the Buffalo Bill order.

I was on the gravel road not graded or
drained now, climbing gradually. The plain
fell away in a long sweep to the south, in colors
of ash, rust, and ghost green. To the north and
east the mountains reared, pocked and rotten
rock breaking through the flanks of some, a
light shawl of snow on the highest. Between
these peaks and the thunderheads stacked
above them were caverns of shadow, gunmetal

blue and dark gray with sometimes a tone of
rare, deep mauve.

For twenty minutes I didn’t pass a vehicle,
and then a muddy old Chevy ton-and-a-half
truck with no fenders and a load of hay went
by. The two inside looked at me flat from un-
der their wide brims and didn’t smile. The
ruts had set like ridges of concrete and the
Volvo slathered along in them, the steering

217

Will Baker

wheel jumping under my hands with its own
life.

Lonesome country. That brings up another
bothersome detail of the Uncle Jim story, a de-
tail that as a boy I had little use for, but which
now, especially now, suggests itself as perhaps
the central one, and maybe explains why I was
driving myself ruthlessly over this godforsaken
eighty miles. Dad and Uncle Jess used to refer
in a veiled way to “that woman.” The Woman
Behind It All. When I was eight I didn’t know
what it was women were behind, and certainly
didn’t think one of them without even being
present could push those two men into the
alley and lay them out there in each other’s
blood. But now I know. Just now I was in fact
myself remembering and trying hard not to re-
member a sweet smile, a beautiful behind, a
cheating heart—a combination that can cause
one considerable grief. I was right in that time
when everything you ever said or did to her ap-
pears wrong, when she seems more powerful
and glorious and radiant, in your overheated
memory, than the mere human you took for a
movie and pizza; the time also when this vision
suddenly chills and darkens because a shadow
has crept beside it, a faceless shadow that she
turns to, smiles at, reaches for, kisses, tongues,
Opens: ease

A shock as from crossed wires and a burned
smell. For your own welfare, from a sense that
you are teasing something that is too mad and
ravenous for the cages of your mind, you jerk
away. There is a numb time. The fenceposts
flicker past. Then a word from an old song ora
scene from happier times starts the deadly loop
all over again.

I smoked for a few miles, because that is one
of the things I do at these times. Besides prop-
ositioning cocktail waitresses and Keno girls.
Maybe because they wear black. Then I pulled
up at a place, a scatter of shacks and corroded
trailers trying to squeeze under half a dozen
ragged cottonwoods. Kirby’s Midas Tavern
said OPEN but wasn’t. Parked in yards were
various vehicles, mostly not operable, but one
trailer had a wash flapping out back in the cold
wind. I got to the front door and there was a
phlegmatic man ina plaid shirt to meet me.

218

Yep it was the right road to Tuscarora back
there at the fork over the bridge. Might or
might not be passable. He had seen a little for-
eign job go over it yesterday, so maybe. Noth-
ing there, in the way of accommodations. He
stopped, blank, so I turned and left.

Maybe the old woman was dead anyway.
Distant Cousin Earl, an affable teacher of In-
dustrial Arts from Sacramento, one summer
four years ago drove his spanking RV to Tusca-
rora to investigate the family legend. He re-
ported that he met an octogenarian lady who
had lived in the town all her life, and who as a
girl of 19 had listened to the excited gossip at
the stage depot on that June afternoon when
two men died. So there was somebody who
might know things about this last detail, this
Woman Behind It All.

But only gossip. Dinnertime gossip seventy
years old. It was beginning to look less and
less like a sensible day. Maybe I didn’t care
whether the old lady was still alive, or whether
she could remember anything if she was, or
whether what she could remember would re-
veal anything to me. Maybe I was just driving,
and driving now in steeper country, swatches
of dirty snow along the roadside, so I could
think about how her hair cascaded down over
that beautiful behind and how she came to me
sometimes like a wave from the other side of
the ocean, and think safely about such things,
not being able to put my head in my hands and
bawl, because my hands had to be on the
wheel, still spinning and jerking from the hard
ruts. It is another thing you can do, besides
smoke and make hopeless passes. You can
drive. I had done it before. The first time espe-
cially. If you’ve heard this one don’t stop me.

A man has a job and a house and a car anda
wife and a kid. He loves them all and worries
about them approximately in that order. For
years they hold together; they interlock; the
wife takes the kid in the car to the school while
the man does his job and then for a few hours
they all fall asleep in the house and leave it
again early in the morning. One year small
things change. A neighbor drives the kid to
school but the wife disappears with the car
anyway. The man pursues the job so far he does

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

not fall back into the house some evenings.
There are parties and dinners and some people
leave before others. Finally some people don’t
even go. Glassware may be broken. Things are
said which have a magical effect of suddenly
diminishing greatly both the person speaking
and the person spoken to. One day the wife

| takes the kid in the car and does not come

back, ever, to fall asleep in the house.
The man gets another car and he drives. He

_ drives perhaps all night. Sometimes he gets
| someplace, where he smokes a lot, and drinks
_ too, and makes passes at people. Or he drives

_ around looking for her, the Woman Behind It
_ All, parks near her house, waits. Perhaps she

arrives finally and is with someone else, the
shadow, and he can hear them laugh in antici-

_ pation on the way to the front door. So he be-
| gins driving again.

We must talk about violence now. In my
case, not that uncommon, it was the self hurt-

hunt "S
,

oy feet ATTA 1)

Pk dhl :

4 wn aA

ing the self. I cut myself and tried to take too
many pills, but not very seriously. Some of my
friends did it much better with the bottle and
the automobile. An odd thing, that when the
Woman goes away or at least plays away, a man
looks for a quiet room where he can hack him-
self or eat oblivion. Not everyone of course.
These are modern times. There is a new school
of thought, according to which one is cool, one
shrugs, one keeps an “open relationship.” I
have seen a few of these open arrangements up
close. One from very close. I want to report
that I find, beneath the casual laughter, the
worldly winks, the arch jokes, the same hard
and horny core of hate, the same murderous
undertow that exists in the ghettos of common
love.

These days everybody is a shrink, so every-
body knows that the modern man who turns
the blade on himself or goes in for revenge
fucking is only taking a substitute. What he

219

as00W JavqI1W

Will Baker

really wants to do is kill the two of them, or at
least the rival, but society frowns on this sort
of direct action.

The implication is, must be, that to take
such steps is a serious aberration, not to be
countenanced. A whole rhetoric has grown up
to mask these raw animal feelings. I under-
stand your position. My needs are not being
met. We have to communicate honestly. I re-
spect you. The children are the most important
thing. We have to stay friends. Friends.
Thought I'd drop over, friend, and try out this
double-barrelled twelve gauge.

Perhaps some people do not believe in these
powerful and sinister emotions. Perhaps most
men are only “upset” or “disappointed.” Per-
haps only a few discover such Neanderthal
strata in themselves. But when I watch my
friends go down into divorce, I see the same
external signs I know so well. The nicotine in-
somnia, the sudden and indiscriminate lust, a
pale and haggard mien that reminds one of
consumption, an inner, eating fire. They've got
the tiger by the tail.

So maybe J am a rare and dangerous Nean-
derthal aberrant, and so was Uncle Jim. West-
ern genes. I do know that the second time
around it got just as hard. A very modern af-
fair, this second one. Massage and good dope
and the Sierras. A blonde. She ran into a Jew-
ish psychiatrist with a swimming pool in
Marin. And I began to understand some
things. I understood the Nazis. I even under-
stood David Berkowitz, the chubby young
man who could not resist the thrill of firing a
.44 magnum point-blank into the faces of
pretty girls. I understood rape. On certain days
directly after sensing the first nub of my an-
tlers I saw some very terrible little movies in-
side my skull, while I drove the Volvo around
like a zombie. The psychiatrist did not get off
easily either.

I was not proud of being the producer of
these ghastly little flicks. But they were hard
to control. I thought I might be crazy and
sought help. Of course it had to be another
Jewish psychiatrist. With detachment he
helped me to translate the horror shows scene
by scene into the new rhetoric. He encouraged

PIPHO)

me to talk this language to others, and indeed
after a time I did not feel so weird and began to
think nice thoughts about my ex. You know,
communication and accceptance. Two years
later we all three chatted around the swim-
ming pool, heated and deductible because of
his bad back, and admired their new baby. We
were modern and normal again.

The rain picks up and the mud ridges are
now slick on the surface. It occurs to me that
I could be stranded here all night if I try to
straighten out one of these curves. Since the
haytruck I have encountered only two four-
wheel-drive pickups, traveling fast, the drivers
at the last moment lifting two fingers from the
steering wheel in an ambiguous gesture. I have
a bag of oranges from my tree in California and
one thin Mexican blanket, which is not much
to pit against a gusty and moonless night on
this high desert. But after making a couple of
hills in second gear I drop into another of the
basins and see on the other side a cluster of
buildings perched on the side of a considerable
peak. Mount Blitzen, according to the map.

On the last rise before town I see higher on
the mountain some tailing heaps and a ruined
smelter chimney. Otherwise Tuscarora is
mostly weathered trailers, a few sagging frame
houses, and one geodesic dome covered in as-
phalt paper. All of them try to squeeze under a
dozen ragged cottonwoods. Beside the post of-
fice there is one square, ancient adobe build-
ing, but the windows are boarded shut. I park
in what looks like the middle of whatever this
is, and see a wooden sign MUSEUM on the
back porch of one old house. A woman ina
down jacket, supported by a cane, moves to-
ward me from another house across the street
and we exchange pleasantries. No she is not
the particular old woman I am looking for. I
must be after either Dela Phillips here at the
museum or Nona Trembath in the white house
at the end of the street there. They’re both over
eighty. Both been here always. Ring long and
hard at Dela’s. Hard of hearing.

I thank her and walk up the steps to begin
ringing long and hard. Dela may be hard of
hearing, but she certainly does not look eighty.
Hair dyed a bright carrot, she still fills her

|
|)

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

loose rayon blouse and her eyes are huge and
warm behind coke bottle lenses. I introduce
myself as I am led into the museum, also her
living room, and she brightens.

“Why sure they was two of them and one
had a wife, her name was Edna, and a kid too |
think. And man number two come along and
they was something went on before, used to
be his wife then I think, and they fought out
there in the street. There was a saloon right
across from that old brick building and they
rolled down in the cellar under it. One had a
gun and the other a knife I think but I don’t
know who shot who. Which one was your
uncle?”

“The one with the knife.”

“That was one of them, all right. I was only
eleven, you know. We had the dinner station
where the stage came in, and I heard the peo-
ple talk about it. We fed seventy-five people a
day there sometimes.”

The porch windows are stacked full of old
pink and violet tonic bottles, lending an Edgar
Allan Poe hint to the light. In the main room
there are glass cases full of chunks of rock
frosted with crystals, cut stones and turquoise,
and an assortment of combs, carbide head-
lamps, button hooks, revolvers, cuff links,
crimpers, augers, and the like. On the wall,
several racks from big bull elk; also a row of
guns including a Sharps buffalo rifle and sev-
eral Winchester and Henry repeaters. Also
many pictures of men beside steam engines
or on ore cars: burly, moustachioed men not
given to hilarity. Other pictures of twelve-
horse wagons stacked with sagebrush (Dela ex-
plains that the smelter ate up all the brush for
miles around; five hundred Chinamen grubbed
it out with hoes). The usual heyday hilltop
views of a sprawl of tents divided by roads of
churned mud.

“So everybody was scared to go down there,
wouldn’t even get close to the saloon. Finally
they heard one man hollering and they came to
see. I don’t know which one it was—”’

“My uncle.”

“—_one of them hollered out ‘Come and git
me I don’t want to die here with this sonofa-
bitch.’ They pulled him out but the other was

already dead, cut up something awful. The
other didn’t live too long after that. Your un-
cle. Where was he from?”

“Texas, I think.”

“That probably accounts for some of it.”
Dela laughs. “They say.’’ She moves to one wall
beside an old pedal pump organ. ‘“‘Here’s a pic-
ture of that woman. Edna.”

It is one of those man and wife portraits
in a little oval frame with a cloudy backdrop,
woman in the foreground and turned a little to
one side, below her master. Hard to tell about
these images of femininity from bygone times;
the coiffures and starch and whalebone usually
obscure whatever it is that made the blood leap
then. But this time I think I can see it. A pe-
tite woman, dark eyes and hair, though per-
haps a little full in the cheeks for the small,
fine nose. Not exactly a smile, but just con-
ceivably that other expression that goes a shade
beyond a smile in the direction of the devil’s
casino.

“That fella ain’t either one of them. He was
my husband’s uncle. She married him after-
ward and they moved East. So she got into the
Phillips, my family.”

Dela beams at me, happy at this relation,
however distant. Then there is a tremendous
shock of thunder and the pink bottles chatter
excitedly on the sills.

“Sonic boom.” Dela nods reassuringly at
me, and waves generally west. “It’s the Navy
over there.”

The Navy, of course.

“We had a big ranch. Not big like Spanish
ranch, but we had ten thousand deeded acres
and three thousand head of cattle. We sold out
to Bing Crosby.” She pauses and I murmut.
“Yes, we knew him and his family real well.
They come here often but then of course they
sold it after he died. Here, I’ll show you the
gun that killed the first man in Tuscarora.”

I look at the old Colt under the glass. “‘In-
teresting,’ I say and tap the case. ‘““Were there
lots of murders here?”

Dela laughs. “Oh no. Tuscarora wasn’t a real
wild town. One man shot over a water deal I
remember. Oh of course when the range hands
got through with riding for two months and

22h

Will Baker

got their three days they would hit for town on
horseback and when they got to the top of the
hill they’d start shooting and come at a dead
run. After three days in town they’d have to go
back and the boss would come around to the
saloons then and settle up for their damage.
You know just busted glass and chairs and
such.”

I pause before a magnificent slab of pol-
ished, petrified wood.

“Sequoias.”’ Dela shakes her head. “Thou-
sands of years ago you know those sequoias,
that’s the big redwoods, went from coast to
coast. This whole country was tropical then
you know.”

I examine the red and yellow whorls of the
grain.

“Were the mines going then, in 1909?”

“They was downhill then. Last big mine
closed in 1916. Hardly anything left of those
days now. That big adobe block building
there. Used to be the lodge building, Masonic
and Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias all to-
gether. Would you sign the register?”

I notice behind the register a hand-lettered
sign that lists the admission at one dollar. I
pull out two.

“I’m paying double, ma’am, for all your
help. And IJ want to take some pictures. Now
what happened to all that machinery?”

“Why thank you sir. There was all kinds of
machinery for a while; all those pumps and en-
gines and the little ore cars you know just rust-
ing away. Between wars they picked it all up
and sent it to Japan. For scrap.”

Japan, of course.

I shoot a few pictures, thank Edna for her
time, and then ask about Nona Trembath.

“White house on the corner. Now she’l! tell
you all about that business. She’s older than I
am you know.” She blinks the huge brown eyes
and smiles. “Sure enjoyed it.”

Walking down the muddy street under a
cavernous sky, the cloud cover now showing a
rift or two as the wind stiffens, I think about
those men in armbands and narrow collars and
moustaches. How they handled the open rela-
tionship. I know I wouldn’t care to be a party

PIP IP.

in any such arrangement with most of them. I
suppose they came to this place, these vistas of
empty air and dry plain and ugly rock, for the
silver and gold, which meant for the money
and the power, the silk and the wine and the
cheroots, which meant ultimately the women.
And most of them didn’t find it. But that
didn’t get rid of the need. The Big Need.
Men’s needs were probably not being met here
in Tuscarora in 1909.

A little bell tinkles when you open Nona’s
gate, just for the opener’s pleasure. For Nona
there is a regular doorbell. I see her coming
through the window in the door, warped a lit-
tle in the glass. She looks under five feet, but
erect in a faded cotton dress. She too wears
thick spectacles, and over the right lens is
taped a square blue wrapper from some powder
or tablet. I am directly invited into the clut-
tered, too-warm room, and state my business.

She commands me to sit in the overstuffed
chair and then she begins at the beginning and
lets me have the whole thing, pausing just a
moment for me to finish fumbling with my
notepad, speaking in bright, flat prose.

“Yes, Baker and Thompson. One was one-
eyed, a great big nigger. Baker J think that
was. Happened on Celebration Day. Thomp-
son was stayin’ here in town. Real quiet fella.
Never said nothin’ to nobody. Baker was work-
ing ona ranch, Roseberry’s place. He was a
real bulldog. They say he’d slip off a wagon
and throw a steer right flat on the ground. Had
a wife or said it was his wife that he kept on the
ranch there. Anyway after this Thompson
came around he spied on em I guess and this
particular day he and Baker started something
and then walked down the alley by the sa-
loon. The real fight started there. People heard
shooting. I guess they rolled down into the cel-
lar and for a long time everybody was afraid to
come near, but finally this Baker threw the cel-
lar doors back and walked out. He said ‘I won’t
die in there with that sonofabitch. I did for
him though.’ But he never lived past seven
o'clock that night. The other fella had his head
cut almost off, just a little skin holding it. I
know that because my dad helped the doctor

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

sew it back on. People asked Baker what the
trouble was and he said ‘Ask Shorty.’ But when
the Sheriff went to find Shorty he had cleared
out. To Idaho. The other thing this Baker said
before he died was ‘Do something for me.
Don’t bury me in the same grave with that
sonofabitch.’ But they did anyway. This is hard
ground. Well everybody figured that woman
was Thompson’s wife somewhere else and this
Baker run off with her, and come here and in-
troduced her as his own. But the funny thing
was a few months later the Sheriff got a letter
from a woman out in Nebraska or someplace
asking about this Jim because she said she was
his wife and wanted to know if there was any-
thing left, like an estate. There wasn’t any-
thing of course but an old saddle and bridle
not worth much.”

Somewhere in this tight weave I got ina
question about the one eye, and Nona said yes
she was sure about that. He was a good fella
too, cordial, and could pitch hay like the dick-
ens. Then the postmistress tapped and came
in, and they talked about an unfortunate acci-
dent two nights ago. An old man died ina head-
on collision on Highway 95 out of Winne-
mucca. “He was eighty years old and wouldn’t
wear glasses, that’s why,” Nona observed. They
moved on to talk about the square dance com-
ing up. The postmistress said they might even
have enough for two squares.

During this interlude I am still thinking
of the woman in Nebraska who wasn’t the
Woman Behind It All but who was the other
kind, the Woman Left Out. Probably left on a
bleak sodhut homestead with a band of rag-
ged, whining children. Left for a little tramp
with something deadly in her near-smile. Why
does a Woman Left Out stick it through, raise
the kids, plant and plow, bake bread and
gather cow chips, while the man with his Big
Need turns to murder? I am speaking of a gen-
eral pattern, knowing of many exceptions,
those Frankies who toted .44s into barrooms or
took their men apart with a razor. But gener-
ally not. Generally men do it.

I do know the feeling, if not the reasons.
There is some connection with the children. In

our time women take the kids when they leave,
and whether fair or not it releases some deep,
dangerous force in a man. After the first numb
horror you go molten at the core, something
rears and begins to rage. Every nerve twangs to
some ancient battle song. When it happened
to me, that first time, I felt the voltage in my
nervous system take a quantum leap. I slept
maybe four hours a night for a month, smoked
three packs of cigarettes a day, and scrawled
pages full of drivel. I also hatched plots. Shoot
him with my deer rifle, take my daughter and
hijack a plane to Cuba. Attuned to such possi-
bilities, I began to notice how much of that
was going on in the daily newspapers. In the
very city I was living in somebody tried it; he
holed up in a maintenance shed at the airport
with his child and made demands, mostly on
his ex-wife. The FBI sharpshooters did for him
and his Neanderthal genes. The kid was un-
harmed, though spattered with her daddy’s
blood.

Most of the time I knew in some chamber of
the brain that these fantasies would not be real-
ized, were only some kind of imperfect psychic
pressure valve. Outwardly I taught classes and
went to committee meetings and mowed the
lawn, and smiled and thanked the neighbors
who brought sympathetic hot dishes to the
Abandoned One. But the heaving magma was
still there inside. A wise old friend came to
visit and told me I was still normal. However,
the tremendous energy I felt was an illusion.
“You probably think you can uproot trees,” he
said. ‘Actually you are very tired and probably
not functioning at peak efficiency.” Maybe so,
but during that month I built a hell of a fence,
played some outstanding touch football, and
wrote the only sonnets of my career.

And no experience of my lifetime has ever
matched this one, the loss of wife and child,
for sheer savage intensity. I felt positively lu-
minous with adrenalin, and if ever I was capa-
ble of—or thought with relish about—walk-
ing down a dusty alley to meet another man
with a gun, it was then.

After the postmistress leaves we shift the
conversation to Nona herself. She has removed

223

Will Baker

the paper wrapper patch from her spectacles,
and her eyes are magnified like Dela’s, but they
are a different, odd color. It is the color of this
country, a subtle blend of gray and green and
brown.

“Tl be ninety come the thirteenth of Octo-
ber. I was married a year or two after we’re
talkin’ about, 1911, toa Welshman. We saved
up and bought a ranch to get him out of the
mines. He was a Cousin Jack, we called ’em.
Welshmen and Cornishmen. Good miners. In
one of the other big mines they had Irish, so
the shifts had to quit at different hours, other-
wise the Jacks and the Irish fought all the
time. We bought 878 acres and 100 head of
cows and ran it until he died in 1941. Bad
lungs, from the mines. Nicest man you’d ever
want to know.”

One of the lucky ones, I think. There were
three men for every woman in this territory
then. And Nona is pretty clearly not an ordi-
nary woman.

“First thing I had to do after he died was
prove up title. My name wasn’t on anything,
just his. I spent three thousand dollars on law-
yers and accountants and assessors to keep that
place. And I ran it myself. When I sold it in
the fifties—you know who I sold it to?”

I shake my head but I think I already know.

“Bing Crosby. Yes sir. And when I sold it I
had seventeen hundred acres, two hundred
head of sheep, two hundred and fifty head of
cows and IJ put up two hundred and fifty mea-
sured tons of hay every damn year. I wasn’t sit-
tin’ down.”

I keep a respectful silence.

“I wrote a story about that and they printed
it in the Elko paper, I’ll show you. And the De-
seret News in Salt Lake sent a man here and they
wrote me up.”

She is swift on her feet and knows just where
the clippings are. I look them over. Woman
Runs Ranch By Herself. Gal with Gumption.
Pictures of Nona in overalls and short hair be-
side her saddled horse. Her life laid out in the
same level talk over sixty-eight column inches,
including two paragraphs on Great Uncle Jim.

“T got five proposals of marriage after that
Deseret News story. Men just wrote from any-

224

where, even Canada.” She laughs. “One fella
wanted to know just how many head of cows I
was running, before he completed his
proposal.”

She was, I suggest, interested? Oh no. One
man and he was the nicest you could want.

What is it women want out of men?

“Kindness.” Quick as a rattler. “See her
wants before she does.”

I work on that by myself for a while.

“Say, you want to see an ounce of gold?”

She returns from a back room with a little
clear plastic locket full of dull yellow grains.

“Got that chain from Buckskin Jack. He
wanted to know where the gold come from.”
She sees me smiling.

“Oh I know some fellas with nicknames.”
She looks at me sideways, devilish. “Buckskin
Jack he was a big nigger like you.”

“You got a name for me?”

“Don’t know you well enough yet.”

“Tl bet you make up those names.”

“I do no such a thing now. You just look, I
got a list of em and everybody is somebody I
knew or heard about. Look here.”

She produces a sheet of paper from her al-
bum and I read through the collection:

Flyspeck Bill, Crooked Neck McCray, Dirty
Shirt George, Cream Puff Ike, Twenty-five
Pinky, The Denver Sheik, Fade Away Kid,
Chippie Chaser, Tamale, Silk Hat Harry, Bolts
and Nuts, Seldom Seen Slim, Snake River
Pete, Gimme Kid, Scissor Beak, and of course
Buckskin Jack.

Then there is Gold Tooth Bess, Broken
Nose Helen, Dirty Neck Grace, and Bull Shit
Alice.

“Some women here too.”

“The sportin’ girls. There was a big sportin’
house here. These people come from all over
the Klondike, Australia, Wales.”

“Couldn't hide their flaws.”

“Land no, everybody got a name right
away.”

“Were there fights over these sporting
ladies?”

“No, not much. Fellas didn’t seem to fight
over them.”

A pause, while I work to come to the ques-

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

tion I realize I have been heading for, have
driven six hundred miles to ask.

“Why do men do that?”

“What: Sportin’?”

“No. I mean why do they kill each other,
like Baker and Thompson?”

“That’s nature. You see a lot of that.”

She waits, alert and confident, but no fol-
lowup question occurs to me.

“Not so much like that nowadays. Now
there’s always something else comin’ along.”

I keep silent, wondering if that makes the
difference. What if I had not been able to fore-
see another after the first, and again after the
second? What if this last one, still haunting
the freeway with me, were the absolute last?
What if no waitress or Keno girl would ever
smile at me again except to increase her tip?
Would nature then push me to murder?

It could not be that simple. Mr. Thompson
did not have to hunt Edna down; there must
have been others available—at least Bull Shit
Alices—in Omaha or St. Louis or Abilene. It
must have been partly the child. Perhaps men

Nona Trembath

have a horror of their barrenness, a desire to
perpetuate and extend their identity, a desire
which if frustrated becomes violent. Zoologists
tell us that the males of a species often fight to
insure that the most aggressive and durable
genes will be transmitted to progeny. The fe-
male merely waits, provocative, at the edge of
the field of battle; she only need exercise her
blind urge to turn her tail to the victor. Her
place in history is already assured. The male
can plant his seed, shape his race after his own
image only by conquest, and in most species he
is put to the test of battle each season.

Among many ungulates, walrus, and some
primates, the defeated males become mournful
exiles. Some have grown too old, and in one
short, bloody encounter have lost whole har-
ems. Once whipped, the stud cannot approach
his former loving mates, who ignore him or
even slash at him in contempt. Sometimes they
do not live long after their loss of power; some-
times they collect in a spiritless fraternity and
graze out their days on poor and stony ground.
Give them an intense consciousness of their

494? G 11tK 4 104d

225

Will Baker

lot, an ability to conceive their own desolate
future, and perhaps you have the formula for
mad lust and destruction, herds of Nazi mus-
tangs thundering through the streets of Reno,
frothing to violate and kill. But I guess I
would have such imaginary Hun-hordes start
with the nuclear testing stations, or the Navy
over there.

“But it was a better world then than it is
now,” Nona goes on without me. ““These poi-
sons they’re putting in the ground. These
wastes. Why that stuff just doesn’t go away
you know. Terrible. But our worst problem is
the refugees.”

I look inquiring.

“Yes, hell, where are we going to put them?
Thousands and thousands coming in from El
Salvador. We haven’t got the room. And those
Cubans. They were just crooks. What are we
going to do with them?”

I don’t know.

“People don’t know what’s going to happen
any more. A fella come around here a few years
back, wanted to look at a mine I have a little
interest in. Wanted a shelter, a storehouse with
food and water and guns underground. Big old
fat pious nigger he was. Had lots of money.
Why I told him he was crazy. What’s the point
of living if everybody else is gone, I said to
him. That’s damn fool craziness.”

I agree. We talk over a few other world af-
fairs, then get back to her life. I ask if she was
ever lonesome during those twenty years spent
running cattle on seventeen hundred acres of
hard ground.

“Oh no. If you got a ranch you got no time
to be lonesome.”

It occurs to me all at once that I have not
asked about children, but she has seen where I
am headed before I do.

“T lost five children, I did. Never had any
children.” She bites her lip when she smiles
this time.

“Your children? You had—”

“IT didn’t have ’em. I carried em. Four, five
months usually. Couldn’t keep them. Not
enough water in my womb, I think. Some-
thing.” She is biting hard on her lip now, and
there is a just perceptible shake in her voice.

226

I fumble out a story about my grandmother,
who had nine, she always said, although two
only lived for a few hours. Those two she al-
ways counted and you could tell she cared
about them. It is neither the right nor the
wrong thing to offer. I stare at the clippings to
keep from looking at her, and after awhile one
of us thinks of something to say and we go on.

Another tap at the door, and I let ina little
man with straight brown hair, freckles, and
buck teeth.

“This is my boyfriend, comes to see me
every day almost.”

“Hiya Nona,” he says and takes a seat.
“What's your name?”

“Will.”

“Mine’s Rick.”

“He’s lived in every state in the union except
Alaska and Hawaii,” Nona volunteers.

“My dad’s a millwright.”

“How old are you?”

“Bight.”

“Every state?”

“Except Hawaii and Alaska,’ Nona reminds
me.

“Yeah, we was in Arizona last year. I hope to
go back there. Where do you live?”

“California.”

He looks noncommital.

I see the landscape darkening outside, and
begin my thankyous, preparing to leave. Then
I remember the oranges, and trot out to the
Volvo and get half a dozen for her. When she
tells me to come back, she means it, though
neither of us believes it will happen. I drive
away, leaving this ninety-year-old and her boy-
friend of eight to their own rare and special
romance.

When I pass Midas the western sky is the
color of stainless steel and I need the head-
lights. The rabbits are suddenly everywhere.
These are big, gray Western Jacks with ears
and tails tipped in black. Soon I am swerving,
skidding, braking, trying to avoid them. The
spears of light make them crazy and stupid;
they freeze or run the wrong way. Once I
counted four at once weaving figure eights in
front of me. Inevitably, with a curse, I hit one.
Then another.

ae

a

The Legend of Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It All

Dodging this way, I think of the beautiful

| behind only intermittently, a little wearily.

The next-to-last cigarette in the pack tastes dry
and bitter, and I am finally feeling the mile-
age. I am also feeling ashamed. The legend of
Great Uncle Jim and the Woman Behind It

_ All. That little bit of a ranch lady back there is

worth six of them. She lost five, died inside
five times, and was driven to kill nobody, but
to run more sheep and more cattle on more

| land.

Nature, she would say. Maybe that’s it.
When it comes down to it they are stronger.
They don’t need us, except for seed, and it

drives us crazy. Our nature to be crazy. Or are
there three kinds, the Woman Behind It All
and the Woman Left Behind and the Woman
Above It All. And all three of them drive us
crazy, crazy as these rabbits, Jesus hundreds of
them, now I have hit four. They take the chil-
dren or they lose the children, and we go wild.
We drive the jets and set off the bombs and
grub for the gold and kill each other. Or
ourselves.

I hit the fifth rabbit and there is nothing but
a little jerk at the corner of my mouth. Because
of the sound. The terrible sound.

227

MARK O’BRIEN

How | Became
a Human Being

Photographs by Betty Medsger

Residents of Berkeley, California,
get used to seeing people in wheel-
chairs because Berkeley welcomes
the disabled into everyday school and
work life. Even so, when I was a stu-
dent there in 1977, there was one
man whose disability seemed so total
that he startled nearly everyone who
saw him—and inspired a lot of awe
and admiration besides—just by
getting himself around campus. He
was Mark O’Brien—a man who, be-
cause of childhood polio, can only
move his head, neck, left knee, and
left foot. I would never have guessed
at the time that I would turn out five
years later to be Mark’s editor, or
that his article in the Spring 1982 is-
sue would turn out to be some of the
most accomplished writing CQ has
ever published.

Mark dictated this article into a
tape recorder in August 1980. His
friend Barbara Belding transcribed it
and suggested he send it our way. In
December 1981 he graduated from

228

the University of California at
Berkeley with a B.A. in English,
and spent the next few years (while
writing for CQ, Pacific News Service,
and elsewhere) convincing the
Berkeley Graduate School of Jour-
nalism to admit him as a student.
(They did, finally, in 1985.) Along
the way Mark bought a computer—
a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100
lap portable—which he operates en-
tirely by mouthstick. “For the first
time, I feel my writing can be pri-
vate,’ he wrote in the Whole Earth
Software Review. “I am free to keep a
journal, write personal letters that
really are personal, and rewrite as
much as I want without having to
pay a secretary.’

This article gives several good rea-
sons why disabled people should be
part of mainstream life, but there’s
one it doesn’t mention. Part of be-
coming a human being for me has
been (slowly and painfully) learning
to be human with groups of people,
like the disabled, who initially make
me feel uncomfortable. That’s not
possible unless I see them in daily
life. Shutting them away diminishes
the humanity of the rest of us.

Art Kleiner

When I was about ten years old and growing
up in a South Shore suburb of Boston, my fam-
ily and I packed ourselves into our station wa-
gon and headed north for a brief vacation in
Quebec. I had never journeyed so far from

How I Became a Human Being

home, but I remember that the trip was fairly
pleasant and that we arrived at our motel east
of the city of Quebec a little after sunset. The
shape and the colors of the landscape were the
things which impressed me the most. The hills
were much steeper, the houses were painted
brighter and, in general, everything seemed to
be more intense in La Belle Province than they
had been in New England.

One day we went to visit the massive Gothic
Cathedral of Ste. Anne-de-Beaupré. The gray
solidity of its mass dominated the surrounding
land in much the same manner as its ancestors
must have dominated the fields of medieval
France. Inside the cathedral there were signs
printed in French and English which forbade
the use of cameras. There were also many pho-
tographers busily taking snapshots of the
statue of Ste. Anne.

But the thing I recall most vividly is the
enormous stone wall covered with casts,
crutches, and various devices associated with
illness. All of these things, we were told, had
been discarded by people who had made the
pilgrimage to the shrine of Ste. Anne, had
prayed with devotion to the saint, and had
sprinkled themselves with the holy water
which was available there. I realized then that
the purpose of the trip was not to see the red-
jacketed Canadian soldiers in the Citadel or the
Canada Dry bottling plant in downtown Que-
bec. The purpose of the trip was to find some
means whereby I could get out of the terrible
bind which polio had put me in. All my limbs
and my trunk were paralyzed. Only my head
could move. As my parents pushed my little
hospital cot around the church, both of my
eyes were filled with tears. To think that all of
these strangers should be praying for me, that
my parents should have gone through the trou-

| ble and expense of bringing us all up here and

that this entire religious enterprise was di-
rected towards people like me was more than I
could bear. My mother asked me if I was all
right. I nodded because I couldn’t say any-
thing. I knew that I did not deserve all of this
love and energy. I knew that I was severely dis-

abled and therefore of very little worth in the

world. I also knew that I would remain se-
verely disabled for the rest of my life, miracles
being few and far between.

Today, twenty-one years later, I am a reason-
ably happy, reasonably busy thirty-one-year-
old student at the University of California at
Berkeley. I am reaching the end of my junior
year and will, with some grace and fortune, re-
ceive an A.B. in English at the end of 1981.
My chief worries right now are whether I shall
qualify for graduate school, which graduate
school I shall enter, and what kind of work I
shall do after I am finished with school. I still
am as paralyzed as when I was a child. I still
cannot sit up straight, turn my head to the
left, or sleep outside of a respirator. But these
problems no longer set me apart or mark me as
a freak as they did when I was a child and an
adolescent. The reasons for this change have
more to do with the nature and the quality of
society than they have to do with me. In par-
ticular, they have to do with how much respon-
sibility a society will entrust to disabled
people.

When I was a child, I had very little respon-
sibility entrusted to me. That is the way it is
with most of us. Liberal economist Dr. Paul
Samuelson tried to counter the conservative
slogan “There ain’t no such thing as a free
lunch” by asserting that we all received free
lunches when we were children. But I am sure
that Dr. Samuelson must have known, even as
a child, that those lunches were not totally
free, that he had to treat his parents with re-
spect, be a good boy, and in all manner live up
to the terms of the parent-child contract which
had been imposed upon him at birth. At least,
that’s the way it was with me up until the time
when I contracted polio. And for many years
after.

A sharp, persistent pain in the gut kept me
awake one night in September of 1955 when I
was six years old. My parents telephoned the
family doctor, who came over immediately and
recommended that I should be taken to Boston
Children’s Hospital. I was to spend the next
two years in hospitals, becoming well enough

229

Mark O’Brien

My iron lung and I took up residence in a dormitory at the University of California in Berkeley in the fall
of 1978. I was told I'd be “on my own” here. I wasn’t sure what that would mean. I was twenty-nine
when I came to Berkeley. Until that time I had been a child of my parents, dependent on them at home,
and a patient of doctors and nurses, dependent on them at hospitals.

That fall I hired attendants for the first time, including Christien Bagley, who pushed me to class. The
state of California provides money for disabled people to hire attendants, something that turned out to be
very important for me. It felt much better being an employer who hired attendants to work for me than
being a patient who waited for nurses and others to care for me. The government spends considerably less
when I live on my own and hire attendants for basic needs than it spent to keep me ina hospital. In the
bargain, I also learn to control my life.

How I Became a Human Being

to be outside of a respirator but never regain-
ing the use of my limbs. During this time I
had to submit myself to the wills of the doc-
tors, nurses, and therapists. This was a new
kind of relationship to me because it de-

_ manded stricter obedience than my parents had
expected and also because it involved very little
_ love. For these two years I lived in terror of the

tyrannical doctor and the short-tempered
nurse. They controlled every aspect of my life
and the only relief which I could find was in
the visits of my family and the work of the
hospital volunteers. I remember at one point
pulling the sheet up with my tongue and my

| teeth so that it would cover my head. I was so
_ frightened by my surroundings that I didn’t

want anyone to see me.
That is why I looked so eagerly ahead to the

| day when I would be discharged so that I could

live with my family. My parents were provided

| with the equipment and the training they

needed to take care of me at home. And life at
home was pretty good; I can’t complain. Of

| course, like every child, I had to do what my
_ parents told me to do. But it was a lot easier
than the hospital. I spent my days with my

_ brother Ken and his friends watching them

play the kind of games boys play. Sometimes
my mother would push me on my little hospi-
tal cot to the vacant lot where the kids played
baseball and football. I liked the arrangement
and I did not want it to change. I did not want
to go back to the hospital and I did not want
my parents to get any older. My life had found
a calm center and I just wanted it to stay there.
But it didn’t. It couldn’t. My family and I
moved from Boston to Sacramento in 1966. |
thought at first that things would remain
pretty much the way they had been, but they
did not. I studied at home on my own and re-
ceived a high school equivalency degree in
1968, when I was eighteen, which was about
the time that I began to notice that it was
hurting my mother to lift me. To keep from
hurting her, I began to spend more and more
of my time in my room reading, watching
television, and listening to the radio. Except
for medical appointments, I never left. Mean-

while, my brother Ken was studying at Sacra-
mento State College, participating in the de-
bate team, traveling all around the country and
winning trophies which covered a mantelpiece.
I was not jealous of him; I could see, however,
as I was getting deeper into my twenties, that
life was passing me by. I could also see that the
blistering Sacramento summers were taking a
toll on my parents. The extent to which they
worked in the heat frightened me.

I think that the day in May of 1976 when
my brother graduated from a nearby law school
was the time I finally became convinced that I
had to get out, that I had to get away from
home. My family went to the ceremonies and
left me behind to read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of
Perception, listen to baseball games, and await
their expected return around four o’clock.
Having gotten wrapped up in the celebrations
of the day, they did not get back till after
seven, by which time my only desires were to
urinate and go to sleep. That summer I prayed
intensely to the Lord for some kind of release
from this embarrassing and uncomfortable sit-
uation—from my physical dependence on my
parents.

Meanwhile, without my knowing of it, my
parents were working toward that end. They
had read a story in the Sacramento Bee about the
Physically Disabled Students Program (PDSP)
of the University of California at Berkeley. My
father contacted the local office of the Califor-
nia Department of Rehabilitation, but the
people there were of little help. So he raised
hell with the department at the state level and
finally succeeded in getting an appointment to
see Ed Roberts, the director of the Department
of Rehabilitation. It was Ed and his mother,
Zona, who launched me on the course which
would take me to Berkeley. At that time, Zona
Roberts was the director of the dormitory pro-
gram at PDSP. She suggested that I should go
into a hospital so that I could be physically re-
habilitated before I entered Berkeley.

I did not think that this was possible. I
thought that everything which could be done
to improve my health had been done at Chil-
dren’s Hospital back in Boston. The day I left

231

Mark O’Brien

I enjoyed my classes, particularly those where ideas were discussed. Until I left home at age 27, I had
virtually no contact with peers, except my brother. For the first year at the university, all I wanted to do
was study. I didn’t see the point of socializing.

home and went to Kaiser Hospital in Vallejo,
California, was a sad one for me. I had never
thought I would leave home. I was sad to leave
my parents but I felt it was a necessary step to-
ward finding a future of my own. I thought
this might be a new start for me; maybe the
people in Vallejo could help me.

Kaiser Hospital was entirely different from
any hospital I have ever been in, before or
since. The building was sleek and modern, the
staff aggressive and hardworking. The thing
which surprised me the most at the time was
that they had developed a new form of physical
therapy, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilita-
tion (PNF), which seemed to have some effect
on me. This form of therapy emphasizes avoid-
ance of pain and the use of crushed ice to stim-
ulate blood circulation. It is a radical break
with earlier schools of physical therapy and
seemed to be much more effective than other
kinds. I felt stronger every day. But there were
no obvious, measurable effects of this, except
that I was able to stay up in my wheelchair for

232

two or three hours at a time, something I had
never been able to do before.’

The other difference in this hospital was less
obvious but perhaps more important. I was en-
couraged to take responsibility for keeping toa
schedule which was attached to my wheelchair
every morning. The schedule had a list of all
my appointments with a space for the person
who was supposed to sign. If I missed an ap-
pointment, the schedule would not get signed.
This forced me to get rides to my appoint-
ments from every possible source, including
even doctors. The therapists told me that if the
nurses could not get me to therapy I was enti-

1. Kaiser Hospital is the only facility in the world that
gives extensive training in PNF. They will refer prospec-
tive patients to the nearest available graduate. Write Kai-
ser Foundation Rehabilitation Center, Attn: Rehab PT,
975 Sereno Drive, Vallejo, California 94589. There is one
book for PNF practitioners, very technical and difficult:
Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation by Margaret Knott
and Dorothy E. Voss; 1968, 2nd Edition; $30 postpaid
from Harper and Row, Mail Order Department, 10 East
53rd Street, New York, New York 10022.

How I Became a Human Being

tled to yell at them. I was very busy at that
place; each weekday I had two trips to physical
therapy, one to occupational therapy, one to
the teacher to whom I dictated some short sto-
ries, and a weekly visit to my social worker in
her office. I don’t know whether it was the
PNF or the intensive activity which made me
feel so exhilarated. All I knew was that I
wanted to stay there.

One day the social worker (whom I shall call
Brenda) took me outside in my newly acquired
wheelchair. It was my first wheelchair; until
then I had been on a hospital cot. She sat down
on a bench and talked with me about my fu-
ture. She said that I could not stay at Kaiser,
that such a stay was not a part of the plan
(whatever that was) and that I could make
things a lot easier for her if I voluntarily went
to Fairmont Hospital, a county long-term-care
hospital. She said that it also had therapists
trained in PNF, that it was either in or near
Oakland, and that if I didn’t like it I could ask
the social worker at Fairmont to arrange trans-
portation back to Kaiser. Contemplating Bren-
da’s large brown eyes, I decided to make things
easy for her. Besides how could I miss with a
money-back guarantee like that?

It was stifling hot when the ambulance I was
riding in pulled up in one of Fairmont’s park-
ing lots. I noticed that some of the windows in
the buildings had air-conditioning units in
them. For a Sacramentan, that was bad news.
It meant that there was no central air-condi-
tioning. But there was more bad news to
come. The inside of Fairmont was dark and
crowded, with walls painted in sickly, pale
shades of green and yellow. The plumbing and
the electrical wiring were on the outside of
these walls, not neatly tucked away inside
them.

When I got to my room, the ambulance at-
tendants plopped me down upon a bed whose
mattress was as soft as a marshmallow. The
people at Kaiser had always preached the vir-
tues of lying on hard surfaces to strengthen
back muscles. Most of the room was to my
left, so I couldn’t see it. All I could see was an
enormous yellow cylinder filled with com-

pressed air. The cylinder was attached with
tubes to something in the bed next to me. I
couldn’t see the thing on the bed because it
was covered over with a sheepskin. I could just
see part of it slowly rising and falling. Occa-
sionally, a nurse would come along and pour
some brown liquid into another plastic tube
which she would hold aloft like the Statue of
Liberty. Later I found out that my neighbor
was Michael Sipos, a bank officer whose brain
had been injured in an automobile accident.

There was nothing to do except try to be-
come accustomed to the heat and the lethargy
of the place. There seemed to be very little hap-
pening. Patients talked about going to therapy
maybe once or twice a week, not every day as I
had done at Kaiser. The staff seemed to be
about twice my age and rather spooky—inter-
ested primarily in furniture, their exhusbands,
and their own ailments. All this I might have
been able to endure were it not for the fact that
some of the nurses were willing to dish out
small bits of cruelty to show me who was boss.
At my first opportunity I had someone take me
to a telephone so that I could call my mother
and beg her to call Brenda at Kaiser so that |
could get out of that awful place. I am afraid
that I upset my mother terribly and after that
the nurses were more careful about taking me
to the phone. A few days later the doctor for
my ward told me flatly that there was no way
that I could go back to Kaiser.

I don’t know how I survived my first three
months there. The two things which saved my
sanity were California State University at Hay-
ward, and a typewriter. My association with
Cal State began in January of ’77 with the be-
ginning of winter quarter. Students were paid
by the state to tape record the classes I had
signed up for and to bring the tapes to the hos-
pital. This way I got to meet Bay Area people
who were not associated with the hospital.

When I was given an opportunity in the
summer of ’77 to attend some classes in per-
son, I grabbed it without consulting any of the
authorities at the hospital. I would take one or
two classes on campus and one or two by tape
at the hospital. Going out to Cal State rein-
forced my sense that something was wrong

233

Mark O’Brien

with the hospital. In class, the professors
would treat me with deference as an interested,
older student. After taking the fifteen-minute
ride back to the hospital, I felt like Cinderella
after midnight. Now I was something that had
to be put to bed and fed. When one of my En-
glish professors talked about the schizophrenic
lifestyle of Theresa Dunn, the protagonist of
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I told him that sucha
divided kind of life was familiar to me, that it
was, in fact, the way I lived.

And in between classes there was the un-
structured, lighthearted life of campus. I
would usually be fed lunch by my attendant in
the disorderly and boisterous atmosphere of
the disabled-student center. The people there
would talk about movies, parties, anything ex-
cept the hospital. That was what I wanted, the
illusion that I was free of the hospital.

The typewriter was something which my oc-
cupational therapist acquired for me in April of
77. It had a pair of microswitches which were

placed above my chin. After my wheelchair
and the switches had been positioned properly,
I could operate the typewriter by hitting one
switch with my chin. This would set off a se-
ries of high-pitched beeps which could be
turned into low-pitched beeps by hitting one
of the microswitches again. Every character on
the keyboard was electronically associated with
a certain pattern of beeps. In this way I could
type out whatever I wanted, albeit rather
slowly. And since the typewriter was down-
stairs in the occupational therapy department,
it gave me an excuse to stay off the ward for
most of the day.

Meanwhile, my physical rehabilitation was
not coming about. I received physical therapy
once a day, and although my therapist had
been trained at Kaiser, she could not keep me
going at the Kaiser pace because, under pres-
sure from the chief of physical therapy, she had
to cut back on my therapy. If I wasn’t getting
any better, Medi-Cal, the state health insur-

Of all the disabled people I knew in Berkeley, I was the only one who couldn’t operate his own chair. I felt
peer pressure for the first time. I hired an attendant to take me to Stanford University, where some reha-
bilitation engineers, over a period of a year, modified an electrically powered chair for me. To make the
controls, they had to figure out what strength I had. I doubted whether they could make my meager
strength useful. Except for moving my neck from front to right side, the only movement I have is in my

left foot and my left knee.

234

How I Became a Human Being

They tested several devices. One day, by raising
and lowering my knee a very short distance, I
was able to move a dot through an electronic
maze. If that was possible, they said, I could
move through the streets. But there were no cars
or people in the maze.

ance program, would not pay for my therapy. I
did feel better, but Medi-Cal’s idea of “‘better’’
was that it should be possible to measure my
progress in such terms as “can now raise arm;
could not before.” I just felt better, something
that can’t be measured.

So I spent the next two years concentrating
on my studies, typing, and occasionally having
pleasant chats with my physical therapist.
After a year, near the end of a session of ther-
apy, my physical therapist told me that she
would not be able to work with me any more.
She told me that if I were able to go to Berke-
ley and get an electric wheelchair it would
probably be better for me than any therapy she
could give me. As she left my bedside she pat-
ted me on the shoulder and I cried a little. I
cried because I was losing a good friend and, at
the same time, losing my last hope for physical
rehabilitation.

My trips to the occupational therapy depart-

When I got my new chair, I had to learn to oper-
ate it. One of my attendants, Mary Lea, volun-
teered to be my driving instructor. We practiced
in parking lots and then on the sidewalk in front
of my apartment. Through a series of mirrors—a
large one above my head and two fisheyes on my
right side—I am able to see an area of nearly 360
degrees. But I had to learn to judge distance per-
spective, different in each mirror. At first, I was
exhausted after only a few minutes of practice.
What with me getting exhausted quickly and
the chair breaking down, it took several months
before I had enough skill and confidence to go on
the street alone.

ment were my source of friendship and sup-
port. Shortly after I got the typewriter my oc-
cupational therapist, Linda Panikoff, looked at
my typing and said, “I’m tired of seeing song
lyrics. Why don’t you do something creative?
Write me a novel.” So I wrote her a novel. At
least I tried to. I also wrote letters, one of
which, addressed to a doctor I knew at Kaiser,
begged for readmission. When my social
worker at Fairmont found out about this she

235

Mark O’Brien

became upset. But the vote of the Kaiser ad-
missions committee had been close; I had al-
most been readmitted. It had been worth the
effort.

Through all of this time I felt as if my life
was being controlled by some external force,
some mysterious “they” who wanted me to
stay in Fairmont until I was “ready” for Berke-
ley. I had no burning desire to go to Berkeley; I
liked Cal State a lot. But I gradually came to
see that the only way I could get out of Fair-
mont was to gain admission to Berkeley. The
doctor would only let me leave the hospital on
the condition that I enter a situation which of-
fered twenty-four-hour-a-day care. This is
what the Berkeley dorms offered. I would live
in my own dorm room and hire attendants, but
there would be staff available through the
night downstairs if I needed help. In June
1978, after a year and a half and three applica-
tions, I was finally accepted. The nurses were
surprised. They didn’t think that a person like
me could live on my own. Even my doctor was
surprised, but because the dorm program met
his standards, he had no reasonable excuse to
keep me out of it.

A brown van rolled into one of Fairmont’s
parking lots and took me away from that place.
It took me fifteen miles to Davidson Hall, one
of the UC dormitories. The trip was brief and
pleasant. I felt like a prisoner who had just
been released. My elation was tinged with a
mistrust of the reality I was experiencing;
something this good couldn’t be happening to
me. I could not believe it was actually happen-
ing until we parked outside the dorms. There
were attendants there, two per shift. They
didn’t wear uniforms like nurses did and they
told me that the dorms were not a medical fa-
cility. But still, I tried to evaluate the place the
way I would evaluate a new hospital. I wanted
to know which attendants were helpful and
which were not.

I soon discovered, however, that this was be-
side the point. I was expected to hire my own
attendants and to pay them with the money
which the county gave to me. The attendants
whom I hired treated me better than the nurses
had because they worked for me and not some

236

institution. Because they worked for me I had
to see to it that they were competent and relia-
ble. I dreaded the day when I would have to
fire one of my attendants. I didn’t want to do
that. But when one of them refused to come to
work or even talk to me on the telephone, I
fired him right away. But good attendants (and
they were the majority) were a pleasure to work
with. My morning attendant, Gifford Swan-
son, invited me over to his place for Thanks-
giving dinner, and my school attendant, Mary
Lea, performed so many acts of kindness for me
that it is difficult for me to cite just one.

She also taught me how to drive my electric
wheelchair, a task which required enormous
patience and keen perception on her part. It
was difficult because I had to navigate by look-
ing in a mirror that was placed over my head.
She couldn’t see what I saw and couldn’t see
where the wheels of my wheelchair were. I
controlled the direction of the chair with a le-
ver under my left foot. To go sharply to the
right I would push my foot down all the way.
To go to the left I would take my foot off the
lever. To control the speed of the chair I had a
lever under my left knee. To make the chair go
full speed I would lift my knee off the lever. To
make it stop I would put my knee down on the
lever. There were switches next to my chin
which enabled me to put the wheelchair into
reverse or to turn it off. It took me more than
six months to learn how to drive the thing and
more time to gain the confidence I needed to
drive by myself. Her perception enabled her to
imagine herself in my place and her patience
enabled her to endure my rudeness and
stupidity.

Because I was, for the first time in my life,
essentially on my own, I had to learn how to
run my own life. I had to take responsibility
for maintaining my health, keeping track of
my money, and battling the institutions which
were designed to help me.

Stanford University was one of these institu-
tions. They had contracted with the California
Department of Rehabilitation to convert an
electric wheelchair so that I could use it. For
several months I made the fifty-mile trip to
Stanford, expecting a chair I could drive. The

How I Became a Human Being

Now I “walk” alone. I take myself to class. It takes me longer to get anywhere than it takes a walking
person. But I get there, and I get there when I want to get there. I hire no attendants now to move me
from place to place. With each step in my independence, the government saves money.

Once I misjudged a curb. The chair toppled and I fell out of it, bruising my knee and my ego. I was
scared, but I knew there was no turning back, that it was unacceptable not to power my own chair. I drove
alone as soon as my knee healed. I recently learned that some strangers refer to me on campus as the guy
who goes to class on his bed. And someone, describing my moving along alone, was quite sure that the
chair was operated by remote control, that I couldn’t be in control of it. Jam.

trips were long and exhausting and very little
progress seemed to come out of them. At one
point, I grew impatient and telephoned one of
the rehabilitation engineers at Stanford and
asked him why things were going so slowly.

“Well, we’re not sure you really want the
chair,” he answered blandly.

I was furious! For years I had been trying to
get a workable electric wheelchair. And now
these guys wanted me to beg them, pretty
please, to give me the chair. I knew that I was a
customer, that they were the merchants, and
that I didn’t have to put up with this kind of
crap.

“Do I have to kiss your shoes?” I asked be-
fore I hung up. By this time I had stopped

being a patient who accepted whatever was
done or not done for me. I had become a person
needing and buying services.

I knew that it was a difficult engineering
project, designing and making a wheelchair for
someone who couldn’t move his arms or legs. I
never understood the technicalities involved,
but I was determined that they should not
treat me as if I were a patient.

The day I finally took delivery of the chair
was very exciting. I had to go to Stanford to
get some final work done on it. When that was
completed they told me that I could drive it on
my own. I drove unsteadily into the reception
area, afraid that I might hit a man in a wheel-
chair. When I somehow managed to miss him,

237

Mark O’Brien

doors were opened for me and I went down a
curving path with adequate skill but overrid-
ing terror.

This was the way I continued to feel when I
began learning how to drive with Mary Lea. I
had never been responsible for my own per-
sonal safety before, at least not since I con-
tracted polio. Now there would be no one
around to help me if I made mistakes. All my
mistakes would be my own. Mary Lea sensed
my fear and suggested that I go ona series of
extended trips by myself. On the Fourth of
July she said that I should try to go to Shattuck
Avenue and to the Center for Independent Liv-
ing (CIL) by myself. I was afraid of going to
Shattuck Avenue, even though it is only three
blocks west of where I live. (By now I was no
longer living in the dorms but had an apart-
ment of my own.) I did not want to disappoint
her, though. So I headed off for Shattuck
Avenue.

It was a long trip on a narrow sidewalk with
bushes and plants brushing against my wheel-
chair. There were strange buildings all around
and I knew that it would be difficult to get any
help here. I had to stop before I got to the next
cross street because there was a hole in the
sidewalk covered over with boards. There was
also a sofa and miscellaneous bits of furniture
cluttering up the sidewalk. I just had to sit and
think about the situation for ten or fifteen min-
utes. Finally, I decided that there wasn’t
enough room to turn around, so I went
straight backwards until I reached a driveway
where I could turn around. That journey wore
me out with fright and I went straight back to
my apartment.

I rested for about a half an hour. Then,
bored with my inactivity, I went off to the
Center for Independent Living, which was only
a block away, toward the east. As I crossed the
broad expanse of Telegraph Avenue, I marveled
at my power to bring cars and buses to a halt. I
drove up on the parking lot of CIL and stayed
there for about ten minutes. Because it was a
holiday there was nobody working there, so I
decided to go home. When J later told my
mother about the events of that day, she called
it my “Independence Day.”

238

Another institution I had to deal with was
UC Berkeley, which proved to be more tracta-
ble. I took just one course during the fall quar-
ter, but two during the winter quarter, and
three during the spring quarter. I spent all of
my time studying, eating, or sleeping, but the
grades I received never seemed to satisfy me.
They were mostly Bs with a scattering of As
and Cs to give the mix some dash. But going
to school itself was fun. I got to move around,
hear some interesting lectures, and meet some
people. One of my classes was a seminar which
included only eight students. I arrived in the
classroom early one day and was by myself
when two of the other students entered. They
were involved in some silly dispute and when
they began to argue about which of them
“should go to the nuthouse first,” they asked
me to arbitrate the matter, hailing me as “Oh,
model of rationality.” I had seldom been re-
ferred to in such flattering terms. It was be-
cause of incidents like this that I gained the
strong impression that I had taken control over
my life and that I was doing something of
value with it.

I sensed that other people understood this
and respected me for it. And strange to tell,
they began to treat me as if I were a human
being. It’s strange to tell because up until then
people had made me feel as if I were something
else, something less, something not capable of
bearing personal responsibility. Because this
society has, by unspoken agreement, defined a
human being as someone who can bear the ma-
jor responsibilities required for a self-directed
life, I was not a human being. Nor are con-
victs, children, or retarded people regarded as
such. But now that I have been given this re-
sponsibility and have proven that I can run my
life as well as anybody else, I have been granted
that degree of respect which is commonly ac-
corded to a human being. When one of my at-
tendants referred to me as ‘‘buddy” it thrilled
me because I had not been accustomed to re-
ceiving that degree of respect. Such respect
came as something of a surprise.

Another surprise which has come my way is
that the federal government is cutting back on

How I Became a Human Being

In addition to getting around on my own, I know people now. Peers, the sociologist would say. Friends, I
say. I’m just as likely as any other person to be going across campus and have someone call my name. One
of my most important discoveries since being on my own is that I’ve discovered that people can like me.

It’s good being a human being.

the money needed to fund independent living
projects. That means cutting back on disabled
people being able to become human beings.
These projects help people like myself get out
of untenable positions of dependence in
homes, hospitals, and nursing homes and into
the world so that they may be full participants
in it. The programs do this by providing the

| help needed to find a place to live. They pro-

| vide the names, telephone numbers, and quali-

| fications of attendants to the people who need

such information. They provide a spectrum of

| services which include transportation, wheel-
| chair repair, and career and academic counsel-

ing. In short, they provide all of the services
which a disabled person must have available if

he or she is to live independently.

Berkeley has more support services for dis-

abled people than any city I know of. But
Berkeley cannot be expected to be a refugee
camp for all of the disabled people in the
United States. There must be independent liv-
ing projects in other parts of the country so
that disabled people can live, work, and study
wherever they please. It is difficult to make the
leap from hospital to university or from hospi-
tal to private apartment. Most communities
have not expected disabled people to live on
their own; they have expected them to remain
dependent on aging parents or other relatives
or to be institutionalized. Independent living
projects can give these communities the chance
to deal with disabled people in a more human
and effective way.

A cutback of federal funding of indepen-
dent-living-for-disabled-people centers will

239

Mark O’Brien

force state and local governments to spend
more money on hospitals, welfare payments,
and other debilitating dead-end programs that
keep people alive but don’t permit them to
really live. Not only are these programs inef-
fective, but they also cost the public a great
deal of money. My stay at the Fairmont cost
over five thousand dollars a month. I didn’t pay
for it; taxpayers in general paid for it. The
money I receive now that I am living on my
own comes to only about one thousand dollars
per month and I am living much better than |
did at the Fairmont. Though my physical con-
dition is the same now as then, I was a patient
there, and a person who hires help here. Inde-
pendent living not only helps disabled people,
it also saves the public money. *

2. Community people trying to start independent living
projects can write the Center for Independent Living,
Senior Deputy Director Judy Heumann, 2539 Telegraph
Avenue, Berkeley, California 94704. Disabled people

240

I have been told that many people in medi-
cine and education are ignorant of the very
concept of independent living for disabled
people. They shouldn’t be. It’s essential. From
my own experience I can say that once a person
is forced to take responsibility for his own
health, he will take better care of himself. This
runs counter to the idea expressed by my doc-
tor at the Fairmont: that disabled people
should be placed in hospitals where they will
be forever taken care of. They will certainly be
taken care of, but they will not be taking care
of themselves. And the act of taking care of
oneself not only improves one’s physical
health, it also improves one’s mental health. It
even leads people to come to believe that they
are human beings.

looking for referrals to independent living projects in
their areas can write the CIL Intake Department at the
same address.

ee, ee ee

_ TOM PARSONS

Don't Beg:

Take Control

Why and How to Hold Local

Political Office

_ From the original introduction

(Summer 1982):

“T could go on for several thousand
words about the day-to-day of deal-
ing with the fire department, city

_ staff, neighbors, and the incredible

wealth of unsuspected problems that

| goes with (elected) office,” wrote

Ridgefield, Washington, city coun-

| cil member Tom Parsons in a letter
' to the Fall 1981 CQ. “Yes please,”

| replied Stewart Brand, and this tac-
- tical manifesto resulted.

Besides making decisions about

| sewer lines and subdivisions, Tom

| teaches chemistry, physics, photog-

raphy, geometry, and sometimes bi-

' ology at Ridgefield High School. . . .

He’s up for reelection at the end of

1983.
Art Kleiner

| Tom didn’t run for reelection at the

end of 1983. Between this article’s
publication and then, three things
happened. One fellow city council

member was arrested for drug deal-
ing and eventually acquitted on
grounds of entrapment after a long,
vicious trial. Another city council
member—who had been a bitter op-
ponent of Tom’s on the drug issue
(Tom wanted education, his oppo-
nent wanted a fund for paying-off in-
formants and making drug buys)—
was charged with murdering a
woman whom people thought was
his wife (it turned out she was ac-
tually his niece). Finally, the town
suffered through a messy campaign
to recall the mayor, which ultimately
succeeded. Eventually, says Tom, “I
got worn out with irrelevancies.
There are so many other things to do
with your life. It’s a question of what
kind of person you are and how
much of that you can stand.”

The article itself is still valid and
valuable.

Art Kleiner

If I had known then what I know now...

How often have such thoughts crossed my
mind, somewhere between rage and regret?
Had I known more of Nixon, asked less of
Humphrey, would I still have voted for Pat
Paulsen in 1968? Would I have carried a sign
and walked out of a Humphrey rally, a regis-
tered Democrat headed for the American Eagle
Party?

Had I known in 1976 what I know now,
would I have been content to win a floor debate
with Ed Fischer at the Clark County, Wash-
ington, Democratic Convention? The issue was
Washington’s Initiative 325, our nuclear safe-

241

Tom Parsons

guards initiative. Ed was (and is) a member of
our public utility district’s board of directors.
And he was chairman of the now-notorious
Washington Public Power Supply System
(WPPSS, pronounced whoops), sponsors of the
state-wide nuclear power program.

I was the delegate from my precinct. We
good guys had spent a lot of time gathering
signatures to get 325 on the ballot. I had come
to the convention prepared with a file of nu-
clear nuggets from Science and the wire services.
Fires at the Rocky Flats Arsenal, deaths at
Idaho Falls, New York’s liability for a nuclear
fuel reprocessing plant abandoned by Getty
Oil... it was too much nuclear negligence for
the genial salesman to counter or explain. We
passed a resolution endorsing 325.

So what?

The initiative’s opponents were Westing-
house, Bechtel, Babcock and Wilcox, Com-
bustion Engineering, Puget Sound Power and
Light, Exxon Nuclear. They outspent us
twelve to one, outlied us ten to zero. We lost
where it mattered—at the polls.

That was before Three Mile Island, before
publicity about the Soviet nuclear disasters,
before WPPSS ran up tens of billions of dollars
of debt.

We now stand as deep in financial fallout as
if we had stayed home or gone to a John Den-
ver concert.

Ed Fischer, who was chairman of WPPSS as
it slid toward bankruptcy, has recently been
forced to resign. He says that he is not to be
blamed, that he got bad advice from the ex-
perts. He has not admitted that he got good ad-
vice from those antinuclear nuts he said wanted
to put us all back in the Stone Age. At least we
can say ‘‘we told you so,” like we said about the
war in Vietnam and Richard Nixon and so on
and soon....

So what?

If we had known then what we know now,
we would have been in office making the right
decisions. Instead, we let everyone down. We
made the mistake of being outsiders, of trying
to mobilize the people behind our cause. We
tried to educate the public.

But the power of the people is much over-
rated. True, it can topple governments. But it

242

is a clumsy tool, difficult and dangerous to use, |

and we idealists tend to overestimate people’s
educability. Unless you can buy prime time at
a hundred kilobucks a minute, several times a
night, you won't get your message across.

There are other ways to attract attention, to
get free air time. But if they worked, the Gen-
erals Electric, Motors, and Mills would be
tossing bombs, staging rallies, and passing pe-
titions to sell their products.

I wish I had known enough in 1976 to run
against Ed Fischer, not just debate him. I
know now what I didn’t then, so I have been
on the Ridgefield, Washington, City Council
for two years now, making decisions.

About once a week I go to a council meet-

ing. It is usually less than exciting, but at least

I am on the right side of the table: the one
where the decisions are made.

Local politics seldom makes headlines, but
local politicians make lots of decisions.

As a sewer commissioner, you may decide
how big that sewer line will be and where it
will run. You thus determine which land will
stay in farms, be subdivided, be industrialized.
Knowing that Zonker’s Uncle Duke got his
start as a local sewer commissioner should be
an inspiration to us all.

Here in Clark County, it was sewage prob-

lems that shut down the Forest Service’s Mount —

Saint Helens Information Center and helped
shoot down an airport wanted by the Federal
Aviation Administration. Local authorities
have thus twice in the past year overpowered
agencies of the federal government.

As a member of a cemetery board, you de-
cide whether to trim weeds or spray herbicide.
You don’t petition, you decide! How much
should it cost to tie up forever a ten-by-fifteen-
foot piece of good arable land as compared to
storing ashes in a small crypt, shared by many?

You decide. If you are willing to bother. So few |

of us seem to be.
Why do so few of us act as rationally and ef-

fectively to prevent government decay as we do |

to prevent tooth decay?
Perhaps we move too often to get involved
with local issues. Perhaps we spent too long in

the university as adolescents, being fashionably —
cynical. Perhaps we have fallen in love with the ~

Don’t Beg: Take Control

role of underdog, outsider. Maybe we are ma-
sochistic Cassandras, loving it, reading the
news each day to find the next big “I told you
so.”

I hope not.
| Worthwhile action zs possible on the local
_ level, the personal level.
Dan O'Neill seems to have learned and acted
_ effectively. Back in 1970 his cartoon character
_ Fred found through the “mush room” that
“politics is poopadoodle.” But his Odd Bodkins
_ cartoon appeared and disappeared at the whim
_ of Establishment editors. Dan learned and is
_ now his own editor. Moral: Don’t beg, take
control. And if that means being a big frog in
—asmall pond, well, there are a lot of us out
_ here in these small ponds.
_ Here in Ridgefield, I ended the draft. We
_had an ordinance which set up a Director of
Civil Defense and empowered him to “com-
_ mandeer vital supplies for public use” and to
“command the aid of as many citizens . . . as
_ he considers necessary.’’ When the governor
| would declare an emergency, as she did when
the volcano blew, the CD’s orders of impress-
ment had the force of law. Our ordinance no
longer reads command and commandeer, but re-
| quest. Sure, we should all help out in an emer-
| gency. But should isn’t the same as should be re-
| quired to by law.
In 1974 [had to stand in front of a truck to
stop the spraying of diesel oil and malathion
/ on my block. Felt foolish. Last year I just made
sure that Ridgefield did not contract for that
_ “service.” Much better.

' Of course I do not act alone. There are four

| other councilmembers and a mayor. It zs vital to
| play politics. But that does not have to mean

| something slimy. Here are some game rules:

_ First, do your homework. Be sure that you
are right and can prove it. Most of your fellows
will have been far too busy with their own is-

| sues to have studied yours. They will be happy
to accept your view and vote your way.

_ Second, approach them privately. No-

_ body wants to be lectured and convinced in
front of an audience. Don’t lecture at all. Talk
about the weather. Bounce your idea off them
_as “I’ve been thinking . .. ,” and leave it tenta-

tive. Don’t press for a commitment until they
have had plenty of time to think it over. They
may see it your way from the start, givena
chance. Pressure invites resistance. There is al-
ways time to try a hard sell later. If they agree
without pressure, you have not used up any po-
litical capital you may need for some less popu-
lar idea. If they simply see that you are right,
you have gained status as a leader. *

Third, don’t bring something up at a
public meeting unless you have First and
Second taken care of. Have the votes lined up
ahead of time and minimize discussion. This
may sound antidemocratic and Machiavellian,
but there are just too many people who enjoy
a fight for its own sake. You may have such
among your fellow decision makers. The audi-
ence is sure to contain a few. You don’t want a
fight or a debate, you want results. Whip it
past them before they figure it out. The sensi-
ble majority of your constituents will respect
and thank you for it.

Fourth, be on good terms with your local
press. In my experience this simply means
being honest and accessible. Reporters are as
idealistically dedicated to an underpaid job as
you are. They are trustworthy until proven
otherwise. You need each other. Besides, they
are interesting and well-informed, fun to
talk to.

Fifth, use your voice judiciously. The
more you say, the less you will be heard. Pick
your issues, let others have theirs.

Finally, most important, speak no evil.
Your opponents may or may not have despica-

* While using the private approach, avoid two legal pit-
falls. First, a quorum may gather for purposes other than
a regular or special meeting, but must make no decisions,
take no votes. To take action at an unannounced, non-
public meeting is to violate the Open Meetings Act in
Washington State. Other states have similar or stricter
statutes.

Second, the appearance-of-fairness doctrine, based on
case law, requires decision makers to bring an open mind
to the meeting where decisions are made. The idea is
sound: you should be open to argument from both sides.
The practice is absurd: you may be elected for your strong
position on dog control, then have to muzzle yourself so
that your vote will not be challenged as prejudiced. Ac-
cording to our city council’s lawyer, it’s legally dangerous
for a council member to express a strong opinion prior to
a vote.

243

Tom Parsons

ble personal and political habits. It is irrele-
vant. If it is so, people will find out. They
probably know already. Look for the best in
even your nastiest opponents. Stick to the is-
sue. These are your neighbors, not punching
bags. There is such a thing as friendly dis-
agreement. Keep it friendly, at least at your
end. You'll sleep better. Personal remarks may
never be forgotten or forgiven. You may be

wrong. People change. So shut up and be nice.

(Boy do I have a hard time with this. But it is
important.)

Let’s say you’re convinced you want to be a
decision maker but you don’t know where to
start.

Start with the local newspaper. Find the lo-

244

cal political news. Follow it for a month or a
year as religiously as most people follow the
sports pages. Learn the issues. Learn the play-
ers’ names and records. Go to meetings. Pick

your favorite issues and arenas. Find out whois

up for re-election and when. Will they run?
Are they popular? Do they have heavy back-
ing? Research newspaper files for their last
campaign’s strategy, opposition, margin of
victory. Call city hall or the county clerk and
find out the mechanics of running for office.
Don’t take it personally if you lose. Be pre-
pared to lose and try again.

If you want to doa better job than is now
being done, do it. You can. I have. You
should.

ADMIRAL
_HYMANG. RICKOVER
_U.S. NAVY, RETIRED

Doing a Job

_ From the original introduction

_ (Summer 1982):

_ Admiral Rickover, builder of Ameri-
ca’s nuclear submarines, has been

| much in the news of late for his pro-
| nouncements at a farewell hearing

_ before the Joint Economic Commit-

| tee of Congress. “We're spending

_ too much on defense,” he said. And

_ “T do not believe that nuclear power

| is worth it if it creates radiation.”

| And “The most important thing we
could do is start in having an inter-

| national meeting where we first out-
law nuclear weapons, then we outlaw
_ nuclear reactors too.”

Where did Rickover get the clout
_ to build such machines and make

| such remarks? Primarily from a ca-

| reer of highly effective management.
| Recently reader John Willis sent us a
_ copy of a speech that Rickover gave

_ at the Columbia University School of
_ Engineering last November 5. In it a
_ lifetime of work experience is capsu-
_ lized with astonishing economy.
Here it is. For an unauthorized biog-
raphy of the demon/saint, see Nor-

man Polmar and Thomas B. Allen’s
new Rickover (Controversy and Genius)
(1982, Simon & Schuster).

Stewart Brand

Copyright © 1982 by H.G. Rickover. No
permission needed for newspaper or news pe-
riodical use. Above copyright notice to be
used if most of speech is reprinted.

In 1929 I attended the Columbia School of En-
gineering for postgraduate study in electrical
engineering. Columbia was the first institution
that encouraged me to think rather than mem-
orize. My teachers were notable in that many
had gained practical engineering experience
outside the university and were able to share
their experience with their students. I am
grateful, among others, to Professors More-
croft, Hehre, and Arendt. Much of what I have
subsequently learned and accomplished in en-
gineering is based on the solid foundation of
principles I learned from them. I am therefore
especially gratified by your invitation to return
and speak this evening.

In 1939 I became head of the electrical sec-
tion of the Bureau of Ships. In this capacity I
was responsible for the design, manufacture,
and operation of the electrical equipment for
the Navy as it rapidly expanded throughout
World War II. Since 1947, after a year study-
ing nuclear engineering at Oak Ridge, Tennes-
see, I have been responsible for the research,
design, construction, and operation of the nu-
clear reactors and the propulsion machinery of
the Navy’s nuclear-powered ships; also for the
Shippingport, Pennsylvania, nuclear power
station—the first commercial nuclear power
plant.

245

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Rickover during the 1960s on a return trip to the
USS Nautilus, the first operating nuclear subma-
rine he built.

In the course of my work, I have interviewed
more than fourteen thousand recently gradu-
ated college students for jobs in my organiza-
tion and in nuclear ships. In recent years a sur-
prising number of applicants, even graduates
of engineering schools and the Naval Acad-
emy, have become enamored with the study of
management—some even majoring in this
subject.

Almost without exception they are fluent in
the jargon of systems analysis, financial ma-
nipulation, and quantitative management.
They graduate convinced they have learned
management techniques that will enable them
to administer any job. Yet most seem to have
an unrealistic perception of what is actually in-
volved, with little appreciation of the impor-
tance of technical knowledge, experience, and
hard work.

Many who teach management in our univer-
sities do their students and society a disservice.
By focusing on the techniques of “modern
management,’ they promote the idea that by

246

mastering a few simple principles of how to
handle people and situations one can become a
universal manager: capable of running any job
without having to know much about the work
to be managed.

Our factories and companies are increasingly
being bought, sold, and operated by profes-
sional administrators, lawyers, and financial
experts who have little understanding of their
products, the technology involved, or the
needs of customers. As these professional
“managers” reach top corporate positions, oth-
ers emulate them and avoid technical educa-
tion in favor of management studies. In my
opinion, our universities should emphasize the
importance of a solid grounding in substantive
learning and downgrade so-called management
science.

What it takes to do a job will not be learned
from management courses. It is principally a
matter of experience, the proper attitude, and
common sense—none of which can be taught
in a Classroom.

After a lifetime of work I conclude that
what can be said about doing a job is hardly
enough for one lecture, let alone an entire field
of study. The key points of such a lecture I
would summarize as follows:

Human experience shows that people, not
organizations or management systems, get
things done. For this reason subordinates must
be given authority and responsibility early in
their careers. In this way they develop quickly
and can help the manager do his work. The
manager, of course, remains ultimately respon-
sible and must accept the blame if subordi-
nates make mistakes.

As subordinates develop, work should be
constantly added so that no one can finish his
job. This serves as a prod and a challenge. It
brings out their capabilities and frees the man-
ager to assume added responsibilities. As
members of the organization become capable
of assuming new and more difficult duties,
they develop pride in doing the job well.

This attitude soon permeates the entire
organization.

One must permit his people the freedom to
seek added work and greater responsibility. In

Doing a Job

my organization, there are no formal job de-
scriptions or organization charts. Responsibili-
ties are defined in a general way, so that people
are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do
as they think best and to go to anyone and any-
where for help. Each person then is limited
_ only by his own ability.

Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effec-
_ tively with transients. Therefore, a manager
_ must make the work challenging and reward-
_ ing so that his people will remain with the or-
_ ganization for many years. This allows it to
benefit fully from their knowledge, experience,
_ and corporate memory.

The Defense Department does not recognize
the need for continuity in important jobs. It
| rotates officers every few years both at head-
| quarters and in the field. The same applies to
| their civilian superiors.
| This system virtually ensures inexperience
| and nonaccountability. By the time an officer
| has begun to learn a job, it is time for him to
| rotate. Under this system, incumbents can
| blame their problems on predecessors. They
are assigned to another job before the results of
_ their work become evident. Subordinates can-
| not be expected to remain committed to a job
_ and perform effectively when they are continu-
| ously adapting to a new job or to a new boss.
When doing a job—any job—one must feel
_ that he owns it, and act as though he will re-
| main in that job forever. He must look after his
' work just as conscientiously, as though it were
_ his own business and his own money. If he feels
he is only a temporary custodian, or that the
| job is just a stepping stone to a higher posi-
tion, his actions will not take into account the
| long-term interests of the organization. His
lack of commitment to the present job will be
_ perceived by those who work for him, and
| they, likewise, will tend not to care. Too many
_ spend their entire working lives looking for the
next job. When one feels he owns his present
job and acts that way, he need have no concern
_ about his next job.
_ In accepting responsibility for a job, a per-
son must get directly involved. Every manager
_ has a personal responsibility not only to find
_ problems but to correct them. This responsi-

bility comes before all other obligations, before
personal ambition or comfort.

A major flaw in our system of government,
and even in industry, is the latitude allowed to
do less than is necessary. Too often officials are
willing to accept and adapt to situations they
know to be wrong. The tendency is to down-
play problems instead of actively trying to cor-
rect them. Recognizing this, many subordi-
nates give up, contain their views within
themselves, and wait for others to take action.
When this happens, the manager is deprived of
the experience and ideas of subordinates who
generally are more knowledgeable than he in
their particular areas.

A manager must instill in his people an atti-
tude of personal responsibility for seeing a job
properly accomplished. Unfortunately, this
seems to be declining, particularly in large or-
ganizations where responsibility is broadly dis-
tributed. To complaints of a job poorly done,
one often hears the excuse “J am not responsi-
ble.” I believe that is literally correct. The man
who takes such a stand in fact is not responszble;
he is zrresponsible. While he may not be legally
liable, or the work may not have been specifi-
cally assigned to him, no one involved in a job
can divest himself of responsibility for its suc-
cessful completion.

Unless the individual truly responsible can
be identified when something goes wrong, no
one has really been responsible. With the ad-
vent of modern management theories it is be-
coming common for organizations to deal with
problems in a collective manner, by dividing
programs into subprograms, with no one left
responsible for the entire effort. There is also
the tendency to establish more and more levels
of management, on the theory that this gives
better control. These are but different forms of
shared responsibility, which easily lead to no
one being responsible—a problem that often
inheres in large corporations as well as in the
Defense Department.

When I came to Washington before World
War II to head the electrical section of the Bu-
reau of Ships, I found that one man was in
charge of design, another of production, a
third handled maintenance, while a fourth

247

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau
operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me.
Design problems showed up in production,
production errors showed up in maintenance,
and financial matters reached into all areas. I
changed the system. I made one man responsi-
ble for his entire area of equipment—for de-
sign, production, maintenance, and contract-
ing. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at
whom to point. I run my present organization
on the same principle.

A good manager must have unshakable de-
termination and tenacity. Deciding what needs
to be done is easy, getting it done is more diffi-
cult. Good ideas are not adopted automati-
cally. They must be driven into practice with
courageous impatience. Once implemented
they can be easily overturned or subverted
through apathy or lack of follow-up, so a con-
tinuous effort is required. Too often, important
problems are recognized but no one is willing
to sustain the effort needed to solve them.

Nothing worthwhile can be accomplished
without determination. In the early days of
nuclear power, for example, getting approval
to build the first nuclear submarine—the Naa-
tilus—was almost as difficult as designing and
building it. Many in the Navy opposed build-
ing a nuclear submarine.

In the same way, the Navy once viewed nu-
clear-powered aircraft carriers and cruisers as
too expensive, despite their obvious advantages
of unlimited cruising range and ability to re-
main at sea without vulnerable support ships.
Yet today our nuclear submarine fleet is widely
recognized as our nation’s most effective deter-
rent to nuclear war. Our nuclear-powered air-
craft carriers and cruisers have proven their
worth by defending our interests all over the
world—even in remote trouble spots such as
the Indian Ocean, where the capability of oil-
fired ships would be severely limited by their
dependence on fuel supplies.

The man in charge must concern himself
with details. If he does not consider them im-
portant, neither will his subordinates. Yet “the
devil is in the details.” It is hard and monoto-
nous to pay attention to seemingly minor
matters. In my work I probably spend about

248

Rickover giving this speech at Columbia
University

ninety-nine percent of my time on what others
may call petty details. Most managers would
rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when
the details are ignored, the project fails. No
infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then cor-
rect the situation.

To maintain proper control one must have
simple and direct means to find out what is
going on. There are many ways of doing this;
all involve constant drudgery. For this reason
those in charge often create “management in-
formation systems’ designed to extract from
the operation the details a busy executive needs
to know. Often the process is carried too far.
The top official then loses touch with his peo-
ple and with the work that is actually going
on.

Attention to detail does not require a man-
ager to do everything himself. No one can
work more than twenty-four hours each day.
Therefore, to multiply his efforts, he must cre-
ate an environment where his subordinates can
work to their maximum ability. Some manage-
ment experts advocate strict limits to the num-
ber of people reporting to a common supe-
rior—generally five to seven. But if one has
capable people who require but a few moments
of his time during the day, there is no reason to
set such arbitrary constraints. Some forty key
people report frequently atid directly to me.
This enables me to keep up with what is going
on and makes it possible for them to get fast
action. The latter aspect is particularly impor-

Saul J, 1uun{Yy Sursaaursug viguintjoy

—— Ss

Doing a Job

tant. Capable people will not work for long
where they cannot get prompt decisions and
actions from their superior.

I require frequent reports, both oral and

_ written, from many key people in the nuclear

| program. These include the commanding offi-
cers of our nuclear ships, those in charge of our
_ schools and laboratories, and representatives at

manufacturers’ plants and commercial ship-

| yards. I insist they report the problems they

have found directly to me—and in plain En-

glish. This provides them unlimited flexibility
_ in subject matter—something that often is not
_ accommodated in highly structured manage-

| ment systems—and a way to communicate

their problems and recommendations to me

| without having them filtered through others.
_ The Defense Department, with its excessive

layers of management, suffers because those at
the top who make the decisions are generally
isolated from their subordinates, who have the
firsthand knowledge.

To do a job effectively, one must set priori-
ties. Too many people let their “in” basket set
the priorities. On any given day, unimportant
but interesting trivia pass through an office;
one must not permit these to monopolize his

| time. The human tendency is to while away

time with unimportant matters that do not re-
quire mental effort or energy. Since they can be

easily resolved, they give a false sense of ac-

complishment. The manager must exert self-
discipline to ensure that his energy is focused
where it is truly needed.

All work should be checked through an in-

| dependent and impartial review. In engineer-

_ ing and manufacturing, industry spends large
| sums on quality control. But the concept of

| impartial reviews and oversight is important in
_ other areas also. Even the most dedicated indi-
| vidual makes mistakes—and many workers are
_ less than dedicated. I have seen much poor
_work and sheer nonsense generated in govern-
| ment and in industry because it was not

_ checked properly.

One must create the ability in his staff to

_ generate clear, forceful arguments for opposing

viewpoints as well as for their own. Open dis-

_ cussions and disagreements must be encour-

aged, so that all sides of an issue will be fully
explored. Further, important issues should be
presented in writing. Nothing so sharpens the
thought process as writing down one’s argu-
ments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discus-
sion become painfully obvious on the written
page.

When important decisions are not docu-
mented, one becomes dependent on individual
memory, which is quickly lost as people leave
or move to other jobs. In my work, it is impor-
tant to be able to go back a number of years to
determine the facts that were considered in ar-
riving at a decision. This makes it easier to
resolve new problems by putting them into
proper perspective. It also minimizes the risk
of repeating past mistakes. Moreover, if im-
portant communications and actions are not
documented clearly, one can never be sure they
were understood or even executed.

It is a human inclination to hope things will
work out, despite evidence or doubt to the
contrary. A successful manager must resist this
temptation. This is particularly hard if one has
invested much time and energy on a project
and thus has come to feel possessive about it.
Although it is not easy to admit what a person
once thought correct now appears to be wrong,
one must discipline himself to face the facts
objectively and make the necessary changes—
regardless of the consequences to himself. The
man in charge must personally set the example
in this respect. He must be able, in effect, to
“kill his own child” if necessary and must re-
quire his subordinates to do likewise. I have
had to go to Congress and, because of technical
problems, recommend terminating a project
that had been funded largely on my say-so. It
is not a pleasant task, but one must be brutally
objective in his work.

No management system can substitute for
hard work. A manager who does not work hard
or devote extra effort cannot expect his people
to do so. He must set the example. The man-
ager may not be the smartest or most knowl-
edgeable person, but if he dedicates himself to
the job and devotes the required effort, his peo-
ple will follow his lead.

The ideas I have mentioned are not new—

249

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

previous generations recognized the value of
hard work, attention to detail, personal re-
sponsibility, and determination. And these,
rather than the highly-touted modern manage-
ment techniques, are still the qualities most
important in doing a job. Together they em-
body a common-sense approach to manage-
ment, one that cannot be taught by professors
of nsanagement in a classroom.

I am not against business education. A
knowledge of accounting, finance, business
law, and the like can be of value in a business
environment. What I do believe is harmful is
the impression often created by those who
teach management that one will be able to
manage any job simply by applying certain
management techniques together with some
simple academic rules of how to manage peo-
ple and situations.

There is concern today over the apparent de-
cline in United States productivity. In search-
ing for its causes we should not overlook the
impact of the many professional administrators
who run large corporations. Though trained in
management at our leading universities, they
are often unskilled in the technical aspects of
the company. As a result they manage largely
in the terms they learned at school. Technical,
operational, and production issues are quickly
reduced to issues of numbers and dollars, upon

250

which these administrators apply their man-
agement techniques. Although in this way
they may achieve financial benefits, an over-
emphasis on short-term profits often ignores
broader issues such as efficient production or
planning for the future. How can they act oth-
erwise, when they have knowledge only of
management theories learned in school?

Universities must accept their share of the
blame for this situation. They have played a
key role in promoting so-called management
science, often at the expense of more substan-
tive topics such as engineering. If students are
the country’s future, how can we justify this
waste of their talent?

The students of today attend college, as I
did over fifty years ago, to lay the groundwork
for the expertise they will develop only after
years of experience in their field. It is the obli-
gation of Columbia University, as it is of all
colleges, to seek to provide them a solid basis
upon which to build their careers—one that is
realistic and practical. We would be far better
off graduating fewer technically capable young
men with realistic ideas of what it actually
takes to do their work, than to graduate a
larger number highly skilled in the techniques
of so-called management yet incapable of
doing a job.

MICHAEL KIMBALL

On Farting

With this article, published Summer
1982, Mike Kimball established him-
self as one of the world’s foremost
authorities on farts. An elementary
school music-teacher near Augusta,
Maine, he devoted four months of
his spare time to research on flatu-
lence after sniffing in vain around the
local library. Need I say that this is
one of the most beloved articles,
judging by reader mail, in CQ his-
tory? Another taboo busted, I
PUESS 5s.

Art Kleiner

Everyody farts. And from primordial man, or
at least since the Garden of Eden Caper, every-
body has always farted—and, most likely, we
will all fart forever. Nobody doesn’t fart, ’est-
ce pas?

Why, then, when I began researching this
article, did I find so squeaking-little published
on the subject? Virtually nothing in the En-
glish language has been penned concerning the
fart. In fact, this little piece you're reading is
a strong candidate for the definitive modern
work on intestinal gas and its socio-scientific
place in the world.

Do you realize there isn’t even an accepted
verb for farting? Fart, itself, is considered vul-
gar and unacceptable by our dictionaries. Flatu-

ul auvUOIag FT

WY NO siseg IT

lence, an acceptable noun, is defined: ““The
presence of excessive gas in the digestive
tract.”’ But who cares about it, really, when it’s
still in the body? The word flatulent is an ad-
jective describing the condition of having ex-
cessive gas in the digestive tract. Flatus, gas
generated in the stomach or intestine, is an-
other noun.

Hey, everybody knows that at some point in
its short life fart is a verb—we average Ameri-
can males prove that about 14 times every day.
Even polite terms like pass gas or break wind
didn’t make it into my dictionary.

Could it be that we average Americans are
simply not supposed to talk about it? But,
surely, you must be thinking, someone must
have to talk about it sometime. Like doctors,
for instance; what do they say? Well, here’s an
excerpt from a letter defending the word fart,
a breath of fresh air as it were, written by a Dr.
Robert J. L. Waugh to the New England Journal
of Medicine: “. . . such awkward phrases as
passed flatus or excreted gas are always used in-
stead of farted. Anda fart—as a noun—can be
visualized on X-ray.”

And Dr. W. C. Watson from Ontario, Can-
ada, in another letter to the NEJM, carried the
ball even further:

“This letter makes it official. The word fart
was used factually, without embarrassment, at
1310 hours on Wednesday, May 17, in Lecture
Room B, University Hospital, during a lecture
to the second year medical class on ‘Gaseous-
ness.’.. . The students have been encouraged
to use it freely where clinically appropriate.

I hope that all other clinicians, men of
honor and upright standing, will follow this
lead. A spark has been struck; a torch has been
lige eea

And so on.

251

Michael Kimball

Not surprisingly, these emotional appeals
spurred a wave of reaction from others in the
medical profession, would-be etymologists
who weren’t quite ready to accept the verb/
noun fart. One suggestion for a better verb
was crepitate. Now, crepitate means, literally, “a
creaking or rattling sound,” and may be fit-
ting, albeit condescending, for older folks; but
it’s certainly not the universal verb we need.
How about exogust? Actually, that’s not a bad
noun, but it makes a fairly awkward verb.
Boomerate? A good British-type verb for a cer-
tain genre of fart, but overstated in most cases.
A logical entry was flatulate; the only draw-
back is the pomposity of its three syllables (or
four, as in, “Who flatulated?’’). Another one
was B.M. Burp. hate that one. It’s lewd and
it’s tasteless. Exmeteorate? Sounds like what Jor-
El used to do before Krypton exploded. Then
there was gaseous intestinal discharges, and an
entry from the Harvard Medical School for de-
flate as both “pleasing to the ear and etymolog-
ically satisfying.” Not bad, but we might stop
and consider the reputations of balloons and
tires. And, finally, someone humorously sug-
gested the term flatus advance by rectal transport,
or its acronym, FART.

Fart, for me, says it all. It’s derived from the
Greek word perdix, meaning partridge, a bird
that makes a sharp, whirring sound when
flushed. The root, perd, easily changed to
pherd, then to the more staccato Germanic fer-
tan, then to fartan in Old English, and finally
to its present refinement, fart.

Fart is unpretentious, simple, and above all,
onomatopoetically right on target—especially
here in New England, where a dialectal pro-
nunciation is closer to faaht, which is pretty
darn close to the real sound (a little off target
west of the Mississippi, though; not even na-
tive Californians roll the R when they farrt).
The dead bull’s-eye, onomatopoetically speak-
ing, of course, is the children’s word poop, from
the noun poopyhorn (that’s podpehorn). This is
easily demonstrated by tightly pursing the lips
and expelling a short burst of wind through
them. Society, however, chooses to leave poop
behind in the nursery of babywords such as

252

Joseph Pujol, also known as Le Petomane, photo-
graphed at Moulin Rouge.

doo-doo, pee-pee, bum-bum, taa-taa, nay-nay, and
mouste-with-( or without )-the-hat.

Fart also tops all other countries in onoma-
topoetics. In Russia, you don’t fart, or even
poop. You 3axXmMécrTbisaTexopmy, and if that’s
onomatopoetically satisfying, it must be phys-
ically jarring. In Germany you furz; in Swe-
den, vaderspand. A fart in Italy is flato; in
Greece, PaOT. In Paris, they per, a neat little
verb, when you think about it—pet—well fit-
ted to the cosmopolitan Parisian and to the vil-
lager alike.

It’s no surprise, really, that France would be
right up there contending in fart linguistics.
After all, she gave the world Le Petomane, the
greatest exponent of the “‘pet’’ that ever lived.
Le Petomane (his real name was Joseph Pujol)
rose to fame and fortune on the stage of the
Moulin Rouge in late nineteenth-century

TT

On Farting

Paris, where at the height of his unusual career
he was earning more than double the box office
of his celebrated contemporary, Sarah Bern-
hardt. Pujol’s remarkable talent was his ability
to inhale and exhale fresh air through his anus,
an odorless performance of music, mimicry,
and other dubious feats such as blowing out
candles from two feet away. (Naturally, if his
gusts were gaseous, he would have torched the
people in the good seats.)

Decked out in a red coat, white bow tie, and
gloves, and sporting black satin breeches, Pu-
jol’s most popular routines were his amazing

imitations: “This one... a little girl; this...
the mother-in-law; this . . . the bride on her
wedding night; this . . . the dressmaker tear-

ing two yards of calico” (a ten-second rip that
was reportedly an uncanny imitation). Other
standards in his popular routine were, of
course, the sounds of thunder and (““Gunners,
stand by your guns! Ready—fire!’’) cannons.

Le Petomane notwithstanding, humans have
taken remarkably few strides through the ages
in understanding, let alone accepting, the fart.
Way back in 400 B.C. Hippocrates wrote in
his Book of Prognostics: “It is best when wind
passes without noise, but it is better that flatu-
lence should pass even thus than it should be
retained; and when a man does pass thus, it in-
dicates either that the man is in pain or in de-
lirium, unless he gives vent to the wind spon-
taneously.” Delirium? Perhaps that is why,
even two thousand years later, proper Victorian
ladies would swoon dramatically if an audible
fart sneaked out past the rustling of their
bustles.

Insanity and drunkenness have also been sin-
gled out. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the
Miller claims, “First, I want to declare that I
am drunk; I know it from the noise I’m mak-
ing... .” And in 1577 another Englishman,
Hugh Rhode, wrote in his Booke of Nurture and
Schoole of Goode Manners:

“Be not lowde where you be, nor at the table
where you syt; Some men will deeme thee
dronken, mad, or else to lack thy wit.”

Inevitably, the lowly fart became the object
of breezy underground satire. In 1722, in the

Fart-lighting can be an enjoyable pastime, but
only when proper safety precautions are taken.

Safety glasses and a fire extinguisher are two es-
sential safeguards.

tenth edition of an anonymous author’s pam-
phlet, The Benefit of Farting Explained, was
printed, “Wrote in Spanish by Don Fart in
Hando translated into English by Obadiah
Fizle.” And Mark Twain, in 1890, wrote a pri-
vately printed parody which was dubbed by
fans ‘‘A Fart in Queen Elizabeth’s Court.”

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
indeed, proved dark years for the fart, knock-
ing it down the social ladder to the bottom
rungs of acceptance. It had become the object
of street slang and derision. A parasite was
now called a fart-sucker; one’s footman or
valet, his fart-catcher. Trousers were your fart-
ing crackers. In Ireland, your jaunting car was
a farting-trap, probably a sly dig at the horse
that pulled it. And if the horse became restless
and began walking in circles, he was “like a

253

Michael Kimball

fart in a colander’ —that is, until the latter
part of the nineteenth century; then he was
“like a fart ina bottle.” If you “couldn’t trust
your arse with a fart” you had diarrhea, same as
if you “‘let a brewer’s fart, grains and all.”

Needless to say, farting has always been a
condition of the working class. Even today the
blue-collar fart is far more commonplace than
the white-collar fart. Take television, for exam-
ple. When Edith Bunker mistakes the popping
of a champagne bottle for an Archie fart, the
audience erupts in unbridled laughter. He
never really does fart, but just the mention,
the very allowance that the fart probably exists
in the Bunker household is a radical kick in the
funnybone for situation comedy—but, in Ar-
chie Bunker’s case, it’s believable. On the
other hand, could you imagine his contempo-
rary, Tom Bradford, Ezght Is Enough’s dad, cut-
ting loose with a TV fart? Or how about TV’s
comic doctors? Any of them—even the irrever-
ant Trapper John or Hawkeye Pierce. No, it’s
much easier to envision a fart on Taxz than on
Dallas.

It is a socioeconomic prejudice that we’re
pretty much all guilty of, and if you think
you're not, read the following two dialogues
and see if either sounds more plausible to you:

“Hiss uh; excuse mes) uly 4s my car
ready yet?”

“Whaddaya want?”

“Have you finished on my car yet? The Toy-
ota there.”

“Nope. ’Nother hour or so. She needs
( pfaahp) a new diaphragm.”

“Okay. Sorry for the interruption. I’ll be
back at three.”

Or, how about this exchange:

“Yes, er, Mr. Kimball. Have a seat, please.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, let’s see, you’ve applied to us for a
collateral loan of two thousand dollars, is that
right?”

SYestthavsiciohte:

“Well, we've checked your credit references
and I don’t see any complications. All we need
from you ( pfaaahp) is a signature here and
right ( pfaaahp) here. Very good.”

“Okay. Thank you very much.”

254

It wasn’t until 1976 that serious attention
was finally given to the fart. In Minneapolis, a
Dr. Michael D. Levitt, professor of medicine at
the University of Minnesota Hospital and As-
sociate Chief of Research at the Minneapolis
Veterans Administration Hospital (and proba-
bly the world’s leading authority on the fart),
was contacted by a twenty-eight-year-old man
who complained that his excessive gas was ru-
ining his sex and social lives. Dr. Levitt and his
associates took the man’s case and in the pro-
cess of treating him made several important
observations concerning the fart, which they
detailed in a paper entitled “Studies of a Flatu-
lent Patient” (New England Journal of Medicine,
July 29, 1976).

In the article, the doctors pointed out that
the fart is composed of five gases: hydrogen,
carbon dioxide, methane (methane is inexpli-
cably produced by only a third of the popula-
tion, and it is this lucky group that has float-
ing feces), and smaller amounts of oxygen and
nitrogen. The oxygen and nitrogen accumulate
in the intestines when air is swallowed, while
hydogen, carbon dioxide, and methane are
produced in the large intestine as the body’s
last resort in its digestive process. Explains Dr.
Levitt, ‘““The job of the small intestine is to ab-
sorb anything nutritional from foods. The
large intestine, on the other hand, contains a
large mass of bacteria that ferments the undig-
ested food, producing gas.” Undigested foods,
in most cases, are complicated sugars that can-
not be absorbed by the small intestine, such as
the sugars found in cabbage, radishes, and ap-
ples; it is the bacteriological breakdown of
these sugars in the large intestine which pro-
duces gas, giving us the fart, with all its thrust
and characteristic odor.

The doctors found further that the average
twenty-eight-year-old man farts 14 (plus or
minus 5.6) times a day, quite a bit less than
the unfortunate man who originally contacted
Dr. Levitt. By his own flatographic estimates,
he had been averaging 35 farts daily for two
years. Dr. Levitt performed a flatoanalysis of
the man’s gas and found that it was 70 percent
hydrogen, indicating intraluminal production
(that is, produced by the bacteria in the lower

|.

Esben Kirk in Gastroenterology, May 1949

On Farting

Apparatus used in the late Forties by a doctor in
St. Louis to collect farts as bubbles in water.

After an enema, water is pumped through a rub-
ber tube into a flask (A) with a cadmium acetate
solution to absorb the gas. The gas is transferred
to a calcium chloride solution in a graduated
chamber (B) and measured by adjusting the solu-
tion’s level against the solution in the leveling
bulb (C). The flatus is analyzed chemically later.

intestine). Sugar was the suspect, specifically
the lactose found in milk. So, to test that sus-
picion, the patient was ordered to drink noth-
ing but milk for two days. Sure enough, on the
second day he nearly exploded, farting an in-
credible 141 times, including a four-hour roll
of 70 blasts, a probable world record!

Bizarre as it may seem, surgical patients
with gas actually run the risk of exploding.
Anyone who has ever struck a match to a fart
can testify to its flammable properties, but
when the gas is hydrogen, trapped in an intes-

tine, look out. Dr. Levitt tells of a surgeon
who was cauterizing a rectal polyp on a patient
when a spark touched off the patient’s intes-
tinal gas. The explosion blew the doctor back-
ward into the wall, jammed the patient’s head
into the table, and ripped open six inches of
his colon. Fortunately, the doctor recovered
and the patient survived.

You may ask, why do I fart more than my
neighbor? Certainly the food you eat and the
way you eat it are the two major contributors
to farting. If you are an air swallower—if you
gulp your food and drink, or take a breath be-
fore each swallow, or if you drink from a bot-
tle—you will fart more. Carbonation and
chewing gum will also put more air into the
fart, hence, more fart into the air.

The lactose in milk can cause lots of gas
in people without enough of the enzyme lac-
tase to break it down. Other foods which are
known gas producers are bran, onions, cucum-
bers, raisins, cauliflower, lettuce, coffee, and
dark beer. And, of course, the infamous baked
bean, which contains the indigestible sugars
called trisaccharides.

Look, if you really want a fartless bean, all
you have to do is remove the trisaccharides.
Simply soak the beans for at least three hours
and drain off the water before cooking. That’ll
do it, mostly, but for extra-fart-free beans,
keep changing the water the beans are boiling
in. The only problem with this method is that
along with removing the gas, you will also be
removing some nutrients. The Daz/y Planet Al-
manac suggests that you then add a little brew-
er’s yeast to replace the nutrients.

But why do all that to the baked beans in
the first place? Everybody farts, right? Brooke
Shields farts. Tonto farts. Mr. Rogers farts.
Donny and Marie fart. Even swans fart. I
think. I wrote to Dr. Levitt in Minneapolis and
asked him if swans did, in fact, fart. He wrote
back and said he had a one-million-dollar Na-
tional Institute of Health grant pending to
study exactly that problem. The point is, why
the secrecy? Why the taboo? Why does society
officially not believe in farts? Why, for heaven’s

255

Michael Kimball

sake, in Emily Post’s Etzquette, is there never
even a mention of passing gas?

Centuries ago, actually in 1460, a similar
etiquette manual was published in England,
and one chapter, “‘A Lytyl Reporte of How
Young People Should Behave,” addressed the
subject quite matter-of-factly, without embar-
rassment: “. . . look into the lord’s face; keep
hand and foot still; don’t spit or snot; break
wind quietly...”

A century later in the Booke of Nurture and
Schoole of Good Manners, Hugh Rhode in-
structed for more abstinence: “Don’t stare
about or wag your head, scratch it, or put your
fingers in your mouth. Don’t look at what
comes out of your nose, or break wind.”

John Russell, in his Booke of Nurture—Sym-
ple Condicions: How to Behave, admonished more
bluntly, and metaphorically: “Don’t pick your
teeth, cast stinking breath on your lord, fire
your sternguns, or expose your codware.”

Later, in 1619, Richard Weste took a bold
progressive step in his book, The Schoole of Vir-
tue, when he suggested that farting may ac-
tually be healthy.

Retaine not urine nor the winde

which doth thy body vex,

So it be done with secresie, let that not thee
perplex.

Sadly, though, just as it seemed that pro-
tocol was about to look more favorably on
the fart, it was banished. In 1825 fart was
abruptly dropped from the Footman’s Dictionary
in England, the strategy being, of course, that
if nobody called it by name, it would go away.
Still, I think it’s safe to assume that even future
moral-whip Queen of the Empire, Victoria,
then only six years old, managed to rip off her
daily allotment of royal stinkers—and a cen-
tury later, so did Emily Post! But in 880 pages
of her modern journal of social decorum, she
wouldn’t breathe of the fart’s existence. (God
knows a runny nose was appalling enough to
the lady: “Don’t apologize and thus call unnec-
essary attention to anything so unpleasant as
having to blow your nose at the table,” she
wrote. “The only thing to do is to end it as
quickly as possible.” Evidently, if you also ac-

256

cidentally farted at the table, you simply took
a sip of Chardonnay and continued eating.)

It would have been an easy enough task for
her to offer some rules for flatulence; simply by
taking a cue from Steve (“Mind if I smoke?
No, mind if I fart?’”’) Martin, and substituting
fart for smoke (or cigarette) in Chapter 64 of Etz-
quette, “For Those Who Smoke” becomes a
workable code of gastric behavior. For
example:

FOR THOSE WHO FART

* One may not fart in a church, or during any
religious service or ceremonial proceedings.
* One may not fart in a sickroom unless the
patient himself is farting or unless he specifi-
cally says his visitor is welcome to fart.
* Good taste still forbids farting by a woman
ona city street. It should be unnecessary to say
that no one should think of farting or lighting
a fart when dancing.
* Farting is forbidden on local buses and on
some coaches on the railroad. These cars are
clearly marked “No Farting.”
* Farting is permitted in the mezzanine or loge
seats in some movie houses, but never in the
main orchestra.
* Farting is forbidden in most museums, al-
though some have designated areas where it is
allowed.
* Legitimate theaters do not allow farting in
the theater proper. It is usually allowed in the
outer lobby, and those who wish to fart during
the intermission go there to do so. It is per-
fectly correct for a man who wishes to fart to
leave a lady who doesn’t, but he should hurry
back, and not leave her too frequently.
* In private situations when there may be some
objection before lighting your fart, always ask,
“Do you mind if I fart?” If there is any hesita-
tion in the reply, do your best to refrain from
farting until you leave.
* Aman should light a woman’s fart if he is
close to her, but not if he is on the other side of
the table or if it would be awkward in any way.
Not bad. Aside from the obvious gender
double-standard, pretty sensible advice,
wouldn’t you say? Too bad she missed the boat.
Well, I didn’t. We're in the Eighties now, a

On Farting

time of radical conformity, and it’s high time
the people had a little farting etiquette, so here
it is. Cut this section out and tape it to your
refrigerator, ‘cause it’s official—and it’s
modern!

A WHOLISTIC APPROACH TO
ANAL-GASTRO-SOCIAL SYSTEMS

I
Ps

Fart is an acceptable verb and noun.

It is generally appropriate to fart in the pres-
ence of one’s friends and/or immediate fam-
ily, so long as the area is ventilated.

When in the company of those other than
close friends or family, simply move to an
open, ventilated part of the room, fart, and

say, ‘Excuse me’”’ or, if you prefer, ““Cana-
dian geese.”

Never fan the fart back at the others un-
less specifically asked to do so.
It is often unnecessary to comment on the
volume, timbre, pitch, or olfactory strength
of your fart unless someone else comments
first.
There is little to be said for the rascal who
farts in close proximity to an infant emerg-
ing from the womb or a person on his
deathbed.
It is seldom necessary to fart into the
telephone.

25/7

DAN O'NEILL

A Friend to the Children

Dan O’Neill’s “comics and stories”
occupied at least four pages in every
CQ between 1975 and 1982. Once
they cost CQ $10,000 in legal fees,
thanks to a copyright-violation suit
with Walt Disney, Inc. (See the His-
tory Appendix for more on that.)
This one, which ran in the Fall 1982
issue, is often regarded as his best CQ
work, although there were several
close runners-up. He may be the sin-
gle spookiest cartoonist in the his-
tory of the medium. Dan now draws
a weekly feature for the San Francisco
Chronicle ““Punch”’ section.

Art Kleiner

258

A Friend to the Children

ALE RIEND TMs Gunes
DE ATH..being everyuhere.. I'm never surprised ashen

r see him inmy Favorite Nevada Saloort..

iy HEN. ZA
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and Nevada is fairly loose .. SO Bones was
bombed .e.

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PIAIK AND WRINKLED
AMD HANGS OUT TUR

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Dan O'Neill

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es. MOOD, ARE ({ CVERWORKED.. SOME DAMN JACKASS HAS

A WE? STARTED ANOTHER WaAR!! WHY?

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TO MORTAL PAIN... AFTER A NORMAL
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“ ] NGLEO BABIES... LZ HAVE e
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A Friend to the Children

MY ASSISTANT ANG TAKE CARE OF
Bree WORPAAL PEACEFUL Ie ers ‘+s THAT
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SURPLUS OF « es

LM THEIR
ONLY FRIEND.

261

Dan O’Neill

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SERVE HIM..
He's PRETTY

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didnt take the {d x's HAVE as groopy WELL Die, ae
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situation ,£'l\ :

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Mr. Bones didnt mind too
much... how could he..*
we were drinking ie
boiler makers.. al

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Yope hiding in those femeesssiat (eee Oh aah | :
bottles , we Found it .. CTSA Ey

ZX. remember the time SAP
Christ turned the water into hag
wime becavse He needed a drink
so maybe we weren't that .
far over the /fine.. consideyin’-:

J. BALDWIN

Born to Fail

J. Baldwin has succeeded-by-failing
at more enterprises and projects than
any other human being I know.

Here’s part of Stewart Brand’s in-
troduction to the 1978 CQ book Soft
Tech, which J. edited:

“James Tennant Baldwin gradu-
ated from the University of Michi-
gan in 1955 and did graduate work
at the University of California,
Berkeley. In 1952 he had the eighth
Volkswagen in America. He first
worked with Buckminster Fuller
about that time. 1955—57 he was in
the Ski Infantry in Alaska. 1958-62
with Bill Moss Associates working
on such advanced camping equip-
ment as the Pop Tent. 1962—68 he
was teaching design at San Francisco
State College (where I met him), San
Francisco Art Institute, and Oakland
College of Arts and Crafts, simulta-
neously. 1968—69 at Fuller’s invita-
tion he was Visiting Lecturer in De-
sign at Southern Illinois University.
1969-72 he was at Pacific High
School teaching the kids and work-
ing with Lloyd Kahn on Domebook I
and Domebook II. 1972-74 he
worked with Bob Reines at Inte-
grated Living Systems in New Mex-
ico contriving a totally independent

solar and wind energy system. In
1976 J. helped the New Alchemists
finish the renowned Ark on Prince
Edward Island, Canada. . . . With
his skills, J. has never looked for a
job. Work looks for him.”

ALCO.) ais the soft-tech’
maven—ongoing expert reviewer on
topics ranging from backpacking to
wind energy to understanding phys-
ics to traveling in China to automo-
biles to the musical saw. Fortunately
for CQ, he has the rare ability to
write fascinatingly about the things
people make, and the tools they use.

Between 1978 and 1982, J. lived
and worked at the New Alchemy In-
stitute on Cape Cod in Massachu-
setts, where he hung out some with
a Cambridge-based writer/financial
trust administrator/urban activist
named Conn Nugent. Conn, react-
ing to what he perceived as smug
secessionism in the CQ “Bioregions”’
issue, proposed a special issue on
“failure and misfortune,” as if to say
to the bioregionalists, ‘““This, too,
shall foul up.” J.’s article was one of
the bright spots of that issue (Win-
ter 1982).

Art Kleiner

Failure is a way of life for designers. We know
our work is going to exhibit certain undesira-
ble qualities until development is pretty much
complete. That’s what research and develop-
ment (“R & D”) is all about. That’s why we
have computer simulations, prototypes, and
test pilots. And a junk pile behind the lab. (Or

263

J. Baldwin

barn. There’s nothing formal about any of
this.) We learn to live with the possibility that
our ideas may not work at all, and that even if
they do work, the critics may not receive us
kindly. The market might not be there, or a
political perturbation might shoot us down.
Any way you look at the situation, the poten-
tial for miserable failure is there. Statistically,
about ninety percent of new designs do not
achieve societal (market) acceptance. In the
face of these dismal odds, how can designers
continue to feel confident enough to work?
And how is disaster to be avoided?

Henry Ford is one of my heroes, mostly be-
cause he dared to ignore much of the conven-
tional wisdom of his day. For instance, when
he was designing the Model T, his engineers
were not issued the expected order to make it
as strong and tough as possible so that failure
would be unthinkable. Instead, they were told
to make it as light as they dared. Then, when
it inevitably broke during road testing, they
were to beef it up appropriately and test it
again. When at last the test car didn’t break,
Henry knew he had the lightest and most eco-
nomical car possible at that time. While his
competition carted around hundreds and even
thousands of useless pounds supposedly needed
for strength, the Model T went on to become a
deservedly great success, at a weight less than a
modern VW. Today, design is primarily for the
perceived market niche rather than for physical
performance on the road. Consequently, when
there is a rapid shift of customer desires, auto-
makers are left trying to sell cars that are in-
herently not very good—a failure of a different
sort.

It is interesting to speculate what Henry’s
press would have been if reporters had been al-
lowed to witness the tests. I can see it now.
FREAK CAR CRASHES! FLAMING PYRE MARKS
END OF EXPERIMENT! The media have always
had a penchant for such things. The public
seems eager to hear of anything that doesn’t
“win”; anything that doesn’t work right is ac-
corded derision or at least a dilettantish ma-
cabre attention. Corporations hide their work
until it is market-ready, not only to confuse
competitors but to prevent media “misunder-

264

standings.” It is mostly for such reasons that
Bucky Fuller admonishes us to never to show
anyone half-finished work.

There is a way to prevent bad press and the
sneers of peers: don’t do anything that is likely
to have problems right there in front of God
and everyone. Carried to an extreme: don’t do
anything new. Or don’t do anything at all.
Students seem attracted to this last route. The
professors that let them get away with that are
obstructing education, but you can see why
they do it. For one thing, professors themselves
don’t care to be exposed to accusations of fail-
ure, and poor student performance tends to re-
flect badly on the teacher. Sure-to-succeed as-
signments assure that the students will not
shame the prof. You won’t hear much talk
along these lines among students or in the fac-
ulty lounge, but the fear-of-failure forces are at
work nonetheless, even in an atmosphere where
you might not expect to find them.

For instance, I once asked some design stu-
dents to construct boats that could carry them
fully clothed and dry across a nearby pond. The
boats were to be fashioned from box cardboard
anointed with waterproof paint. I thought it
would be a good exercise in that there was no
literature to search and no “‘resource persons’’
available for advice on the subject. The stu-
dents would be forced to think for themselves.
They’d also get some practice in using mate-
rials appropriately (you can’t make a wooden
boat design out of cardboard), they’d get a
chance to see an idea take physical shape under
their own hands, and if they didn’t sink they’d
get a taste of success. After a great deal of
teeth-gnashing and some hilarious test sink-
ings, they produced a fleet. Since the students
all faced the same problems, the test sinkings
were regarded with amused interest rather than
mean laughter and ego-deflating gibes.

On launching day, even though I knew bet-
ter and despite looking outwardly calm, I was
as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of
rocking chairs. What if they all sank? What if
somebody got hurt? Someone might sve me!
People in California can get sued for just about
anything. Worse, CBS-TV was going to be
there. Was I about to be made a public fool

Born to Fail

along with my students? In many societies,
that’s a fate worse than death. Well, the
launching went fine. Only one boat sank, and
it had been rather cleverly made to do so by a
gal whose public personality was based on elic-
iting pity, so we may still claim that one as a
success. TV presented us in an acceptable,
nonderisive way. It was a great day for all. My
mailbag over the years tells me that those stu-
dents appreciated being put into a position
where the “win” was not at the expense of an-
other person. In a sports-oriented society,
that’s a rare opportunity.

Among my peers, however, there were few
who approved of the assignment. With one ex-
ception, all who approved were without ten-
ure. The gist of the disapproving remarks was
that sorties outside of the classroom were
somehow suspect, and that my students had
been guilty of doing their bulky projects in
space officially designated as ‘“‘noncurricular.”
But we got the real message, all right. It was
“Don’t take chances.”

I was enough of a whippersnapper at the
time to be shocked at finding this attitude in
a school of creative arts. I began to note that
even in beginning art classes, students were
graded on whether or not they did “good art.”
They could fail if they tried something that
didn’t work all that well. At that time, a male
student could fail his way to Vietnam! The re-
sults of this policy were predictable: Students
faithfully executed art that closely resembled
the then-current style, all too often the style in
which their professor worked. Students who
bravely attempted innovations generally re-
ceived poor grades. Their work tended to look
ragged—a natural consequence of innovation,
because the first of the new is nearly always at a
disadvantage when compared to the last of the
highly developed old. Needless to say, there
was not much failing work produced, espe-
cially by the men. There wasn’t much new
either. There rarely is under such circumstan-
ces, even when there is a big prize awaiting a
well-taken Bold Move. Witness the sorry dis-
play of impotence in Detroit when the very ex-
istence of the American automobile industry is
at stake. In a real sense, the fear of immediate,

laughable, Edsel-type failure precipitates
larger catastrophes. These are often seen as the
result of mysterious bad luck or malice or in-
eptitude. They are more often the result of lack
of nerve.

Assessing blame for failure is an enterprise
closely associated with chance-taking. It’s easy
to do even if one does not have any idea of what
is really going on. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in
music to detect when a concert pianist hits a
wrong note, and this principle can be effort-
lessly extended into invalidity. Murphy’s
Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will go
wrong’’) is often cited to cover mistakes arising
from insufficient thought, insufficient informa-
tion, or sloppy execution of an idea. In my
own incarnation as an Industrial Designer, I
have never once seen a Murphy’s Law failure
that was not, in fact, a failure due to pure care-
lessness. A laid-back, don’t-get-uptight atti-
tude combined with an ever-increasing techni-
cal complexity make Murphy a popular excuse.

This seems a good place to say that it is
probably not possible to make any relatively
complex technology absolutely fail-proof. The
interactions involved in a nuclear-power plant,
for example, are so labyrinthine that there is
no way to foresee all possibilities. Computer
analysis helps, but obviously has not proved to
be one hundred percent effective at predicting
conditions that lead to failures. In such cases
all we can expect is (I hope) a reduction of the
evil effects of failure—hardly a comforting
thought. The only sure preventive measure
then becomes “Don’t attempt the project in
the first place.”

This is different from the student failure-of-
nerve cited earlier. It comes after due thought
and investigation. A reading of the history of
some of the more infamous technical failures,
such as the Teton Dam, nearly always reveals
that bravado (some say machismo) overrode
thoughtful analysis that would have either
modified the design or stopped the project al-
together. Uninformed courage can be fatal!
Failure of “experts” is all too often due to po-
litical meddling.

I admit that my own most spectacular fail-
ure was, uh, well, I zgnored something I

265

J. Baldwin

shouldn’t have. I was testing a small sports rac-
ing car designed for use on a track. It had three
inches of ground clearance. The seat was an an-
atomically comfortable shape pounded into the
belly pan of the car and upholstered with a
quarter-inch of foam and leather. The three-
inch ground clearance was measured under the
bulges hanging down beneath the main floor
line. What I had ignored was what would hap-
pen if a tire blew or a wheel came off. That
wasn’t on my mind when I was striving to get
the car as low as possible. In trying to be very
clever, I had not thought out all aspects of the
situation. When a steering part snapped, the
car dropped to the pavement and the bottom
of the seat bulge zizzed along the shoulder as I
fought the car down from ninety or so. We
stopped, enveloped by an evil-smelling smoke
comprising foam, leather, and fried ass. I’ve
thought things out with assiduous discipline
ever since, and have not had to invoke Mr.
Murphy again. (I also have my welds x-rayed.)
For a long time after that I tended to be conser-
vative rather than smarter and more careful.
(There’s a difference.) I got bored being
conservative.

I’m sure you can think of instances where
avoidance of immediate failure can lead to later
failure. As with my car, the later failures tend
to be things we didn’t think of or didn’t want
to think of. Much of the environmental degra-
dation seen today has come from folks trying to
avoid, say, a market failure. They worry about

266

that so much that they don’t consider what
their actions are going to do in the long run,
especially to the environment, which is not a
paying customer. Yet over and over I’ve seen
manufacturers stoutly oppose environmental
laws affecting their businesses even when com-
pliance would result in extra profit. I think
this happens because the people involved are
causing failures in “another department,” one
with which they are not familiar. The phenom-
enon reminds me a bit of Thomas Kuhn’s “par-
adigm shifts” in that there is not as yet a meta-
language that enables people in one field to
talk meaningfully to those in another. Money
does not talk usefully when one is discussing
environment, though business people often try
and force it to.

All this chat adds up to most failures being
preventable. Oh yes, there will always be just
plain bad luck—after all it is possible to roll
snake eyes a thousand times in a row on honest
dice. And sometimes failures come from Forces
Beyond Our Control. But, unlike kilo-snake
eyes, usually not. If you really think things
through, even to the point of checking things
out in bailiwicks other than your own, and if
you don’t worry too much about people laugh-
ing at you, and if you do your work carefully,
you'll probably do okay. At least you won’t
have failed in the worst way possible: seeing
something go down because of insufficient ef-
fort or courage.

GARY NABHAN

Kokopelli—
The Humpbacked
Flute Player

From the original introduction
(Spring 1983):
Gary Nabhan is a bit of a hump-
backed flute player himself. He’s
been appearing at various Southwest
_ Indian reservations bearing seeds of
vegetables that the locals haven’t
seen in decades and long ago gave up
on. Both he and the Indians are in-
tent on a sustainable agriculture that
spans centuries, that uses the accu-
mulated wisdom of centuries. It’s a
first-rate science.

This paper was originally given as
_ atalk at the Lindisfarne Fellows
Conference, November 1982, Cres-
tone, California.

Stewart Brand

Gary is the president of a nonprofit

_ conservation organization in Tucson,
_ Arizona, called Native Seeds/

_ SEARCH. About the same time he

_ gave this talk, he published a

_ book—The Desert Smells Like Rain,

_ from North Point Press—that am-
plifies this story further. It’s about

the desert—wet or dry—as a place
where people can thrive if they seek
stewardship, not conquest, of the
land.

Art Kleiner

In The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry
expresses the true, hard challenge for those
who are involved in farming and resource
conservation:

The most necessary thing in agriculture. . . is
not to invent new technologies or methods, not
to achieve “breakthroughs,” but to determine
what tools and methods are appropriate to spe-
cific people, places, and needs, and to apply
them correctly. Application (which the heroic
approach ignores) is the crux, because no two
farms or farmers are alike; no two fields are alike.
Just the changing shape or topography of the
land makes for differences of the most formidable
kind. Abstractions never cross these boundaries
without either ceasing to be abstractions or
doing damage. . . . The bigger and more expen-
sive, the more heroic they are, the harder they are
to apply considerately and conservingly. '

Wendell Berry makes clear the contrast be-
tween heroic abstractions, characteristic of cer-
tain religious traditions, and daily practice,
sometimes found at the margins of these same
traditions. He feels that although the Bible
does define proper human uses of the natural
world, the heroic Judeo-Christian tradition has
been too abstract, not earthly enough in its ap-
plication or in its attention to practical partic-
ulars. Even the earthward example of St. Fran-
cis of Assisi was never seriously applied by the
Franciscan order; even before his death, the
Franciscan institution decided that he was “for
the birds.” This “other worldly” philosophy

267

Gary Nabhan

Etienne B. Renaud, Kokopelli in Southwestern Lore,

September 1948

This and similar drawings in this article show
some of the many representations of Kokopelli
the Locust, the Humpbacked Flute Player,
copied from prehistoric Pueblo Indian pottery
fragments and petroglyphs by archaeologists in
the 1920s and 1930s. “In his hump he carried
blankets, belts, embroidered scarves, and some
seeds and grains, as presents which he gave to
each girl whom he seduced.”’ Other Kokopelli
pictures show different spellings of his name,
based on their sources.

has long dominated civilized mankind, and
Berry urges us to return to responding skill-
fully to the particulars of the place in which we
live.

I sense that much of the ecological destruc-
tion wrought by people participating in certain
religious traditions is not considered by them
to be spzritually impoverishing in any way. Al-
though desertification in the Middle East has
been blamed on the Judeo-Christian tradition,
it clearly predates and is not limited to just
this one branch of Western religion. It is per-
haps not surprising that the so-called cradle of
Western religions and of annual grain agricul-
ture—the Tigris-Euphrates “Fertile Cres-
cent’’—was one of the first areas in the world

268

to be ravaged by soil erosion, siltation, and sal-
inization as a consequence of poor agricultural
management. Fields at Tell Asmar from six
thousand years ago now sit under ten to eleven
meters of silt.” Yet I doubt that a fact such as
this is ever discussed in courses on the history
of Western religions—it is not recognized as
evidence of negative feedback or poor practices
associated with a belief system; it may even be
considered to have nothing to do with religion.

In contrast to this view, there still exist tra-
ditional (though not unchanging) communities
in which the way that one farms and concerns
himself with wild resources has everything to do
with the spiritual life of the community. Some
of these are Native American communities,
which have associated with them agricultural
fields that have been tended for centuries; a few
of these villages are considered to be among
the longest continuously inhabited places in
North America. This stability through time
has helped harbor agricultural diversity. These
villages offer us insights into the mutually
reinforcing connections between spiritual life
and skillful care for the ecological integrity of
food-producing land.

Although I am nota resident of these com-
munities, I have worked in some of them. My
friends within them have taught me some
things that have stirred up my beliefs, and re-
directed my learning toward certain practical
skills. Yet I do not wish to make Hopi and Pa-
pago farmers out to be “heroes” of the sort that
are in some kind of ideal balance with nature,
as if you could put a dozen noble savages on
one side of a scale, and a dozen plants and ani-
mals on the other, and strike some kind of ho-
meostasis. When we decide that Indians are or
are not “in balance,” we usually stop there in
learning anything from them; these two
choices limit rather than advance our under-
standing. Certainly, contemporary Native
Americans are increasingly faced with serious
land-use problems, as the results of economic
pressures and acculturation that have caught
up with them. Local deforestation occurred
prehistorically, and native people suffered the
consequences. I will even grant that when

Kokopelli—The Humpbacked Flute Player

a large wave of Native American ancestors
crossed the Bering Straits ten to twelve thou-
sand years ago, these invaders played a key role
in the extinction of mammoths, mastodons,
horses, and camels, and that since then, other
local faunal extirpations have occurred due to
short-term over-exploitation. Yet I tend to
agree with Calvin Martin that “‘on the whole,
the North American Indian earns high marks
for his cautious use of plant resources . . . cau-
tiously because she (Nature) could strike back
against abuse.’”*

I also agree with Martin that a spiritual con-
tract between certain cultures and particular
lifeforms is evident, but I do not pretend to
understand the depth and complexity of their
spiritualism. A final apology: I do not wish to
imply that all Papago or Hopi accept the view-
points I am about to discuss. Rather than
speaking for them, I am simply relating a few
things that some of them have spoken to me.

For several years I have been studying native
agricultural ecosystems in the desert South-
west, and the drought- and heat-adapted crops
which allow them to function. They are native
not merely because Native Americans farm
them. They are mative because their crops are
mostly ones that evolved from wild relatives
which can still be found in or near these fields.
They are pollinated by endemic solitary bees
that coevolved with particular American plant
genera and are much more efficient in pollen
transfer and more faithful to their crops than
are honeybees. Certain indigenous legumes
such as the tepary bean have associated them
with nitrogen-fixing Rhizobia bacteria endemic
to the region. These crops and their symbionts
are finely tuned to local climatic and soil con-
ditions. In ak-chin floodwater fields, nutrient-
rich runoff from local watersheds is utilized,
rather than water “imported” from mountains
nearby or from underground aquifers filled
during the Pleistocene. These fields exemplify
the concept that agricultural ecologists George
Cox and Michael Atkins have written of—that
the food-producing systems having the best
chance of enduring are those which deviate
least from the energy flows and nutrient cycles

Side view of a Kokopelli effigy pitcher, about
twelve inches long, dating ca. 1000-1150,
found in a Pueblo site in northwestern New Mex-
ico. The rounded contour of its underside repre-
sents the humped back.

of the natural ecosystems within which they
work.* Some of the native fields are so well in-
tegrated into natural desert ecosystems that it
took European-Americans literally centuries of
contact to realize that cultures such as the Sand
Papago and Southern Paiute farmed as well as
gathered. Papago fields, unlike most “‘ad-
vanced” agricultural systems, show levels of
plant diversity comparable to the surrounding
wild floodplain environments, rather than re-
ducing nature to monoculture.

Needless to say, these native fields provide a
sober contrast to the modern water-consump-
tive agriculture transplanted to the desert,
which is undergoing a demise. Some of the
highest rates of water loss from transpiration
recorded in the world have been observed in ex-
Otic crops under irrigated agriculture in the
Phoenix, Arizona area. Whereas hybrid corn
and cotton use two to three acre-feet of irriga-
tion water in central Arizona, native crops such
as teparies produce respectable yields on eight
to twelve acre-inches, and their yields decrease
with excessive irrigation. Introduced crops
sometimes require two to five times the irriga-
tion a native crop would need, if one takes into

269

L961 (jaf ‘Aynbruy uesiaury uz

wagnid KiYf{yq tjadoxoy Y ‘t4equvy] *1 asolivy

Gary Nabhan

account irrigation to cool the environment, de-
liver chemicals, etc. The native strategy is the
opposite—to fit the crop to the environment
rather than trying to remake the environment
to fit the crop.

As part of my work, I have been helping In-
dian farmers to locate and conserve native de-
sert-adapted crop varieties, since it is projected
that over half of the crop varieties utilized in
the New World at the time of Columbus may
have already been driven to extinction due to
colonial suppression, acculturation, and other
factors. Where do the remaining varieties per-
sist? In the fields of Native American commu-
nities with a strong traditional spiritual life—
of more than forty reservations in the South-
western states, it is largely the five or ten
where native ceremonial observances persist
that the genetic diversity of desert crops per-
sists as well.

This is more than just a correlation. At the
Hopi mesas, where more than eighteen vari-
eties of beans and over twenty named varieties
of corn have been recorded, many of those
which persist are utilized in ceremonies basic
to the community’s spiritual life. While on the
surface these ceremonies could be interpreted
as being as ‘“‘abstract” as some Christian obser-
vances, they serve to tie people into the land
community of plants and animals in very con-
crete ways.

A few years ago, I was inquiring at a Hopi
home about a bean variety that not only is re-
sistant to root knot nematodes but is higher in
protein quality and quantity, as well as in sev-
eral minerals, than most beans found in our
grocery stores. A Hopi man at Second Mesa
told me, “Oh yes, I always have some of these
stored away, and I grow them every year as
well. We need them to sprout in the kiva prior
to the Powamu, the Bean Dance in the winter.”

I had been to the Bean Dance the year be-
fore, and had seen the forty-five-centimeter-
long sprouts delivered door to door by Katsina
dancers one frosty dawn. “So those are the kind
of beans that make the long sprouts?” I asked.
The Hopi man laughed and replied, “Yes,

270

that’s the one—those pahaana {white man}
beans won't even work. We had a new boy ini-
tiated into the kiva last year who didn’t help
grow out his clan’s beans, and thought he
could get away with just buying some white
lima beans at the store to use in the kiva. He
planted them in the sand basins just like we
did our Hopi bean, but when our sprouts were
tall, his hadn’t even come up. Did he ever ear
it from the other men. . . .” The reason the
newly initiated boy was chastised by the other
kiva members is that this later winter under-
ground planting of beans is said to forecast the
productivity of the coming crop season. If the
beans do well in the sand basins in the kiva,
the crops in the summer fields will be plenti-
ful. The boy had perhaps endangered the com-
ing crop and the optimism of the ceremony by
not paying attention to particulars—all beans
are not the same.

While the Hopi make fine distinctions be-
tween particular varieties of crops, they are
careful to maintain some variation within each
variety. Perhaps I should say, they are careful
not to be ¢oo careful, or to act as though they
could totally control a crop’s destiny. On one
occasion, I asked a Hopi woman at Mungapi
if she selected only the biggest corn kernels of
all one color for planting her blue maize. She
snapped back at me, “It is not a good habit to
be too picky . . . we have been given this corn,
small seeds, fat seeds, misshapen seeds, all of
them. It would show that we are not thankful
for what we have received if we plant just cer-
tain ones and not the others.” Agricultural
ecologists have demonstrated that such genetic
mixtures are key to farming in marginal, un-
predictable environments. While no single na-
tive seed may do as well as hybrid corn under
optimal conditions, the mix may well out yield
it under variable conditions.

In a similar way, many Indians are tolerant
of certain plants in their fields that outsiders
would call weeds. Some of these, like the
anomalous sunflower, found at Hopi, are not
only wild relatives of cultivated crops, but
they are rare enough to be considered for
threatened species status elsewhere in their

Kokopelli—The Humpbacked Flute Player

range. On the mesas, this sunflower is found
almost exclusively around sand dune fields,
where it is specially recognized and left to
grow. Most untrained observers would be hard-
pressed to recognize it as being different from
the common wild sunflower species. Yet for
centuries, the Hopi have let it grow around
their fields, and have harvested some of its pet-
als, from which they make a yellow ceremonial
face-paint. It has been sustained despite this
low-level harvesting, adding to the diver-
sity of their fields and perhaps occasionally
contributing genes to the Hopi’s cultivated
sunflower. A valley of fields is named for it—
A’ ga qaungwu—in recognition that even rare
wild things have their place in this world.

My impression is that these gestures of con-
cern for other living things aren’t done out of
economic motives, even though the failure to

_ do so might later affect the community eco-

nomically. These are acts done out of the Hopi
sense of spiritual propriety.

Similarly, I have heard Papagos argue that
it is a spiritual responsibility to farm, and that
failure to do so erodes the community from the
O'odham Himdag, the People’s Way. Since the
Papago way of farming is rainfall- and wa-
tershed-dependent, they enter into an intricate
system of mutual feedback with natural events:
To farm, they must have rain. To have rain,
they must have a cactus wine feast and “‘throw
up the clouds.” To harvest enough cactus fruit,
there must have been enough rain for the sagua-
ros to be productive. To be productive, it must
have rained earlier, but also, no one must have
harmed the saguaro cactus in any way, for they

| are people too, and vulnerable.’

Yet the rain that falls on the field itself is not

| enough to sustain a crop; the desert washes
_ must run free to bring water into their fields.
| The water from the sky must meet the water

from the ground. When watersheds and aqui-

| fers are tampered with, the whole web of inter-
_ actions begins to unravel. Imagine cranky old
_ Papago farmers showing up at government

meetings to complain about a well being put
in the ground twenty miles away from their
homes, or to condemn a solid-waste disposal

put in a seemingly dry sandy wash fifteen miles
upstream from their fields. While such acts of
resistance are relatively rare today, they never-
theless suggest that traditional Papago recog-
nize that their agriculture is watershed-sensi-
tive and that their responsibility goes beyond
simply tending to their own field and house-
yard. Although the entire watershed may not
belong to them, ina very real way they belong
to it.

There is increased public awareness of the
problem of species extinction and loss of ge-
netic diversity in both wild and cultivated or
tended biota. But only a few analysts of this
dilemma, such as Steve Brush,° have related
that the remaining genetic diversity is depen-
dent upon the persistence of a variety of agri-
cultural ecosystems, each finely tuned to its
geographic setting and ecological context.
These agricultural ecosystems have in turn coe-
volved with various cultural groups, whose
ethnicity, or distinctive ways of dealing with
particulars, are now being consumed by mod-
ern media-mediated monomania. As ethnic
communities become acculturated, losing their
other-ness, the Earth loses part of the diversity
of its life-support system. Ironically, an elderly
Sand Papago woman has used the analogy of
distinctive seed stocks to describe the fate of
her people:

It is this way, long time ago, when people first
realized the world, from that time on it is recog-
nized from their maker that people who bore
children. . . band together. People were like a
cultivated field producing after its kind, recog-
nizing its kinship, the seeds remain to continue
to produce. Today all the bad times have entered
the People, and the People no longer recognize
their way of life. The People separated from each
other and became few in number. Today all the
People {O'odham} are vanishing.’

In Mexico, Victor Toledo, Cristina Mapes,
and their colleagues have warned that their
country will fail to feed itself as long as it tries
to impose one kind of agriculture on an ethni-
cally and geographically diverse land. Instead,
they should begin with the existing agricul-
tural ecosystems that indigenous cultures have

pig a

Gary Nabhan

The Hump-backed Flute Player

by Gary Snyder

ie
The hump-backed flute player
walks all over.
sits on the boulders around the Great
Basin
his hump
Hsiian Tsang
went to India 629 AD
returned to China 645
with 657 sutras, images, pictures,
and 50 relics—
a curved frame pack with a parasol,
embroidery, carving,
incense censer swinging as he walked
the Pamir the Tarim Turfan
the Punjab the doab
of Ganga and Yamuna,

is a pack.

Sweetwater, Quileute, Hoh
Amur, Tanana, Mackenzie, Old Man,
Bighorn, Platte, the San Juan

he carried
“emptiness’’
he carried
“mind only”
vijnaptimatra

The hump-backed flute player
Kokopilau
his hump is a pack.

a

In Canyon de Chelly on the North Wall up by
a cave

is the hump-backed flute player laying on his
back,

playing his flute. Across the flat sandy canyon
wash,

272

wading a stream and breaking through the ice,
on the

south wall, the pecked-out pictures of some
Mountain Sheep

with curling horns. They stood in the icy
shadow of the

south wall two hundred feet away; I sat with
my shirt off in the sun facing south, with the
hump-

backed flute player just above my head.

They whispered; I whispered; back and forth

across the canyon, clearly heard.

ca

A Quichua Indian of Cochabamba, photo-
graphed in 1942, showing the carrying blanket
and flute common throughout the Andean high-
lands. Wrote botanist Hugh Cutler, “Possibly
one of his ancestors, similarly equipped, carried
pod corn to North America and became the leg-
endary flute player, Kocopelli.”

zRQor Muwnuvl

‘AI2A02SICT DUIDVA M7 ‘sa2UaIIC So Kane PInsolrIAA

Kokopelli—The Humpbacked Flute Player

Bye

In the plains of Bihar, near Rajgir, are the

ruins of Nalanda. The name Bihar comes from
“vihara”’

—Buddhist temple—the Diamond Seat is in
Bihar, and

Vulture Peak—Tibetan pilgrims come down to
these

plains. The six-foot-thick walls of Nalanda,
the

monks all scattered—books burned—banners
tattered—

statues shattered—by the Turks.

Hsiian Tsang describes the high blue tiles, the
delicate

_ debates; Logicians of Emptiness, worshippers

of Tara,

- Joy of Starlight, naked breasted, “She who

saves.”

4.

Ghost Bison, Ghost Bears, Ghost Bighorns,
Ghost Lynx,

Ghost Pronghorns, Ghost Panthers, Ghost
Marmots, Ghost

| Owls:

Swirling and gathering, sweeping down, in
the power

of a dance and a song. Then the “White Man”
will be gone.

_ Then the butterflies will sing

on slopes of grass and aspen
thunderheads the deep blue of krishna

_ rise on rainbows; and falling shining rain—
| each drop—

tiny people gliding slanting down: a little
Buddha

seated in each pearl—

and join the million waving Grass-Seed Bud-
dhas

on the ground.

Bs

Ah, what am I carrying? What’s this load?
Who’s that out there in the dust
sleeping on the ground?
with a black hat, and a feather stuck in his

sleeve.
—It’s old Jack Wilson,
Wovoka, the prophet,

Black Coyote saw the whole world
in Wovoka’s empty hat

the bottomless sky
the night of starlight, lying on our sides
the ocean, slanting higher

all manner of beings
may swim in my sea
echoing up conch spiral corridors

the mirror: countless ages back
dressing or laughing

what world today ?

pearl crystal jewel
taming and teaching

the dragon in the spine—
spiral, wheel,

or breath of mind

desert sheep with curly horns,
the ringing in your ears

is the cricket in the stars.

6.

Up in the mountains that edge the Great Basin
it was whispered to me
by the oldest of trees,

by the oldest of beings,

the Oldest of Trees,
Bristlecone Pines.

and all night long, sung on,
by a vast throng
of Pinyon Pine.

Hugh C. Cutler in The Journal of Heredity, October 1944

Heredity, October 1944

Hugh C. Cutler in The Journal of

Gary Nabhan

A Pueblo Indian petroglyph of Kokopelli from
the upper reaches of the Glen Canyon, photo-
graphed in 1942.

An ear of Bolivian Indian podcorn (below) com-
pared with an ear of ordinary corn. The podcorn
survived despite no support from established
agronomists. At first its survival was attributed
to repeated mutations; then Hugh Cutler real-
ized that Indian medicine men had perpetuated
and distributed it.

274

evolved, and develop a number of local or re-
gionally adapted food production strategies
based on this diversity.* Crying “food first’ is
not enough, especially if it imposes inappro-
priate food production systems on the land.

Today, genetic engineers tell us not to worry
about the drying up of indigenous gene pools,
for they will soon create new genetic combina-
tions faster than they can evolve in nature. En-
gineers tell us not to worry about falling
groundwater levels and the rising costs of fuel-
ing pumps, for they will create solar pumps to
extract the presumably infinite amount of
water below the Earth’s surface. Sociologists
tell us not to worry about the demise of tradi-
tional cultures, that new lifestyles and reli-
gious cults are cropping up every day. Yet these
are ephemeral in the sense that they are “com-
ponents’’ without contexts, creations without
long-term fitness. To accept these cheap sub-
stitutes while letting twelve thousand years of
organic agricultural experimentation slip away
means not only that we will lose a rich agricul-
tural heritage but that we will diminish our
options for the future as well.

As I was pulling together these thoughts, I
realized that perhaps the native-crop-conserva-
tion effort needs a guardian spirit in the sense
that St. Francis has become the patron saint
of the ecology movement. A fitting candidate
may be the humpbacked flute player, who has
been seen on petroglyphs near agricultural
fields in the Southwest for millennia. His flute
has been considered a cloud-blower or drinking
tube by some Southwestern peoples, suggest-
ing an association with water-bringing for
crops, according to anthropologist Bruce An-
derson.” It has also been considered a phallus,
and he is certainly associated with sexuality
and fertility for both humans and plants. What
is striking is that so many observers have imag-
ined his hump to be a bag of seeds. For in-
stance, Gary Snyder has called him an “‘itiner-
ant seed carrier.” Forest Roth-Shomer of the
Abundant Life Seed Foundation (Next Whole
Earth Catalogue, p. 100) has for years modeled
not just his appearance but his activities after
this archetypal seed carrier. Forest travels
throughout the Pacific Northwest with a flute
in hand and a bagful of seed-collecting equip-

Kokopelli—The Humpbacked Flute Player

ment on his back. As he hikes, he harvests
seed, and has brought dozens of species into
commercial distribution through his efforts.

Perhaps the most remarkable connection
was made by ethnobotanist Hugh Cutler in
the 1940s in an essay, “Medicine Men and the
Preservation of a Relic Gene in Maize.” He
noted that flute-playing, pack-carrying medi-
cine men in South America have for centuries
used a very rare form of maize, podcorn, for
the cure of respiratory ailments. The irony is
that podcorn cannot survive without diligent
care from humankind—every kernel has its
own tightly held husk and is also enclosed by
the larger papery husks surrounding the entire
cob. When expressed in most maize varieties,
it does not breed true. Over millennia, most
farmers have likely destroyed or neglected this
relic gene if it shows up in their cornfields, due
to the extra work involved in maintaining it.
Yet Callahuayo and Quichuan medicine men
have taken care of this relic gene, as well as
carrying it with them to other cultures. These
wandering South American herbalists are
known to have reached into Central America
historically. Perhaps more importantly, pod-
corn persists today in South America where it
was first recorded nearly two centuries ago.

What Hugh Cutler noticed is that where
podcorn crops up in prehistoric sites in the
Southwest, it is often near petroglyphs of the
humpbacked flute player! He speculated that
the same line of indigenous medicine men who
were responsible for the persistence of a relic
gene of maize over centuries may also have
transported it from one continent to another.
The South American herbalist with his flauta
indigena and the Hopi’s Kokopelli may carry
the same grain.

The trouble is, Kokopelli is not exactly
“saintly” in Southwestern Indian myths and
ceremonies. He has been known to “hump”
little girls and even old anthropologists. I
mentioned this dilemma to Gary Snyder; he
smiled, replying, “It all goes back to fertility.”

NOTES

1. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, p. 280. (Re-
viewed in Summer ’82 CQ.)
2. Harry W. Lawton and Phillip J. Wilke, “Ancient

~s Pattie tf

A drawing by a Hopi artist of a Kachina dancer,
wearing a painted mask representing Kokopelli.
Ethnologist and Hopi priest J. W. Fewkes wrote:
“The head is painted black and has a white me-
dian facial line. . . . There is a warrior feather on
top. The body is black and girt by an embroi-
dered sash. There are buckskin leggings, stained
yellow and green.”

Agricultural Systems in Dry Regions,” in Agriculture in
Semi-Arid Environments, pp. 1-43, A. E. Hall, G. H.
Cannell, and H. W. Lawton, editors, 1979, $56 postpaid
from Springer-Verlag New York, 175 Fifth Avenue, New
York, New York 10010.

3. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game, p. 186; 1978,
$12.45 postpaid from University of California Press, Or-
der Dept., 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California
94720.

4. George W. Cox and Michael D. Atkins, “Agricul-
tural Ecology,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America
56 (1975), p- 6.

5. Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain,
1982, North Point Press.

6. Steven Brush, H. J. Carney and Z. Huaman, “Dy-
namics of Andean potato agriculture,” Economic Botany
35 (1981), p. 70.

7. Filamena Bell, Keith Anderson, and Yvonne G.

275

E061 ‘Asopouqig uvnsauy fo nvaang ‘seuiqwy igopzy ‘saynay ‘“\ ‘[

Gary Nabhan

Stewart, The Quitobaquito Cemetery and Its History, West-
ern Archaeological Center, National Park Service, Tuc-
son, 1980.

8. Victor Toledo, J. Carabias, Cristina Mapes, and C.
Toledo, “Critica de la ecologia politica,” Nexos 4 (1981),
p. 17 (Mexico City).

9. Bruce Anderson, “Kokopelli: The Humpbacked
Fluteplayer,” American Indian Art (1976), p. 36.

10. Hugh Cutler, “Medicine Men and the Preservation
of a Relic Gene in Maize,” Journal of Heredity 35 (1944),

PP. 291-294.

AAAHHH!

It suddenly came to me today that the word for
the spirit of the universe or whatever you want
to call “It” has the sound “aahhh” in many

276

many languages. To wit: God, Jah, Ra, Allah,
Brahma, Atman, Yahweh, Ram, Baal, Ahura
Mazda (I’m using the Thesaurus), Og, Hachi-
man, Mab, nagual, mana, wakan, huaca.. . .
I think it’s because the ‘‘aahhh”’ sound is so re-
laxing of the jaw and throat, letting go, giving
in to what is. Makes me reminded of the one-

ness of all us folks.
Larry Ephron

Berkeley, California
{Spring 1983}
Not to mention “Wakan Tonka” (“Great Mystery’’—Sioux),

“Buddha,” and other examples and exceptions that readers
might recall.—Stewart Brand

EEOMREU

Rachelann:

A Remembrance

From the original introduction

(Spring 1983):

We see writing dealing with the de-
cade of the 1960s fairly often, and
I’m never sure if it’s because of the
history of this magazine or that the
period is now at a sufficient focal

_ length to allow for introspection.
_ This story impressed me with its lan-

_ guage and a celebration of quiet dif-

ferences. Leo Dreu lives in Lowell,
Massachusetts.
Richard Nilsen

It hardly matters that she was plain; matters
not at all since we were, both of us, plain in

_ those far ago days, she in her kick pleats and

ribbons, me in my Eisenhowers.
True, there was the freckle I didn’t like but

| there were the powder-blue eyes which I did—
- very much. The smile, too, was pleasing, I

think: a wry, tight-lipped little smile, ex-

_ tremely sensual for one so obviously pure.
_ And, of course, there was the laugh like bowl-

ing balls knocking at the door, a guffaw but
oddly welcome.

Rachelann. It was all one word like that—
no second capital, no hyphen, but deliberately

Rachelann, meant to be spoken full in one
breath like a Nat King Cole song or an edict.

To say she was a throwback is to understate
the case. Certainly she predated Lou Ann
Curry, the first and only girl whose books I
would carry home. She had not Lou Ann’s
Catholic school-uniformed plumpness or or-
ange trampoline curls that bounced whenever
she walked, had not the kewpie Irish smile of
pretty Brenda McKenzie who waltzed with me
at the Cadet Officer’s Ball. No, Rachelann was
Victorian, hers a life of cameo and lace, the
sort of squeaky-clean, bookish girl-next-door
girl so mythically abundant in the 1930s yet
very nearly a cultural impossibility in that but-
terfly-and-blue-jean decade known to us as the
1960s, which is why I now suppose I consider
myself lucky to have known her.

I deny accusations I was drawn to her simply
because she was easy to be with and washed
with Camay. More than for what she was, I
needed her for what she was not.

They were not years I had been reared for,
the 1960s. Typically Catholic, I had been
weaned on a doctrine of eternal hell for a fib to
father or for a piece of meat eaten on a Friday.
Imagine, then, my little boy’s concept of pun-
ishment when applying this same crew-cut
theology to, say, the Tet offensive or the Berke-
ley awakening. The whole world, or so it ap-
peared, had given itself over to Satan and I was
in no way about to trade in my tuna salad sal-
vation for a bayonet for anyone. Against war
and the whifts of change, I had only a little,
silver star to hold on to placed upon my fore-
head by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Back then,
emerging from a world which promoted Julie
Andrews and Sleeping Beauty, a world I more
than believed in, that star seemed to me
enough—and then some.

Leo Dreu

Rachelann was the ideal counterpart to this in-
nocence of estrangement; she had studied bal-
let and was learning to sew when first we met
(pursuits found unacceptable among the female
population of her day).

In an age of curiosity, Rachelann remained
curiously aloof, a princess in a tower who sus-
pected little, if anything, of what the rest of
the world was up to. It hardly fazed her that,
all around, her peers were speaking differently
from her; she did not understand so-called hip-
pie jargon and never expressed a moment’s in-
terest in caring to. If she could not close her
ears to what was said, to so-and-so describing a
friend as ‘‘burned out” or so-and-so describing
a song as a number that “‘really cooked,” she
could, in fact, close her eyes and would petu-
lantly pass off these, to her, foreign expressions
as little else than proof positive of what she
termed the “‘arsonistic tendencies” of a coun-
terculture drinking and drugging its way to-
ward eventual oblivion.

Very little sixties substance made its way
through her turret window. Amidst it all, she
continued a cultivation of proper ways and
clung to her own special language of stan-
dards. If there was a friend with whom she
had, perhaps, become suddenly disenchanted,
she would explain the situation regally, eyes
lowered, and ina barely tolerant posture whis-
per, ‘“M has fallen out of my good graces.” In-
feriors (those found to be lacking in strong
I.Q.’s and style) were quickly dismissed as
“fudgeheads” and individuals considered by
her to be particularly offensive (and there were
many) were invariably set aside as “sorry cups
of tea.”

This archaism, this self-immersion ina
thought and a manner more becoming toa
turn-of-the-century spinster, was the result (or
so insisted her mother, from whom she might
well have taken lessons in charm and accessi-
bility) of “‘too little socializing and too much
Amy Lowell.” And while there was daily evi-
dence that she had, indeed, deliberately raised
herself in an atmosphere which no longer held
any basis in fact, leaving her the brunt of many
an acneed tease, there were also those times
when it became more than apparent that her

278

behavior stemmed, too, from some hidden line
of anger, a self-pity coupled with genuine fear
(and this fear was justified, her concept of a
rock group being the Lettermen) that culture
had scheduled a change of costume and that
she, in the wings, had been left a character no
one had bothered to tell.

But meekness, charity, intellect; these, too,
were dear to her ways and many, put off at first
by what they saw in her as economy of emo-
tion, were later anesthetized, even charmed by
her devotion to a combination pragmatic/ro-
mantic sensibility, an attitude of order and
balance possessed of the tranquillity of mathe-
matics, the near-perfect alignment of plaid.
Vatican II, fallen heroes, Magical Mystery
Tours, mothers burying their sons; each and
others of these were either beneath her com-
ment or beyond her ken. And yet, in her awful
isolation, she seemed somehow (or so I could
pretend) the only Dutch boy for miles around
with an eye on the dike and a finger at the
ready. Old-fashioned though they were—a
reverent passion for the history of manners, a
health for time, an insistence for roses—her
oddities were lovely, and because they were so
very out of their element, they lent respect to
sentimentality and created for me (dare I say
recreated?) the clearest illusion of a simpler
age.

Where it began, I think I can say. Memory
serves up a weekend phone call during which I
ventured a merry imitation of a favorite Clas-
sics professor. Rachelann laughed, and some-
where in the timbre of that laugh I sensed
something, a trickle of newness, the glad rus-
tle of old coats being shaken out of moth balls,
that had my ego thinking no one before me
had ever made her laugh.

She seemed pleased, on the other end, that I
shared her love for books, affection not only for
their substance but affection for bound paper
print. Soon, nightly talks turned to nightly
strolls.

The windows of the library would be orange
for us on those dark university evenings. There
seemed, at the time, nothing more wholly sat-
isfying than a walk with a bunch of books un-

|
|
|

Rachelann: A Remembrance

der arm and a chat with Rachelann. I listened
intently to her discourses on Currier and Ives
and museums, tried mightily to understand
her contempt for the myths of faded jeans and
flannel shirts and, welcome wonder, even came
to know fondness for her slightly comic walk.
She had a curious, pendular walk, a dancer’s
build and thighs, optically bent at the belly as
if someone or something, some devilish sprite

perhaps, hovering above and just to the front of
her, had attached a string to her navel and was
forever invisibly pulling her forward, feet at
right angles, hips thrashing for gravity in
three-quarter time. Unique, to say the least.

“Do you find I have a foolish gait?” she
asked me suddenly one day.

“Different, not foolish,” I answered.

She nodded approvingly. “You're the first
one who hasn’t made fun. Actually, I’m quite
proud of my walk. It comes from long hours
spent at the barre.”

“T see,” I said.

She stopped. “And you mean to say you find
it not revolting? Even my double ankles?”

“Even those.” I smiled.

Her freckle did a little dance. “It’s time you
met my folks,” she said.

Most of our time was spent in the family
kitchen with Rachelann’s mother, Woodrow,
and her younger brother, Lee. Oh, yes—and
with Mittens and Snoopy, the dogs. A father
figured somewhere in all of this but he was one
of those dinosaur daddies in whose presence
one always felt imminent the discussion of a
dowry and whom one avoided as often as
possible.

I favored most the time spent in the
kitchen. I like kitchens, particularly “Meet Me
in Saint Louis’ kitchens where the emphasis on
patterns and windows stages the sun and
where, in any corner, you are likely to taste the
smell of poppy seeds and licorice that makes
you feel good and safe and warm, only it isn’t
really poppy seeds or licorice at all you are
smelling but ordinary things—dough and ap-
ples and sugar—wrongly identified by our fos-
tered belief that only the exotic could ever
make us feel so very much at home.

I became, I think I can tell you, surrounded
as I was by piping bowls of bisque, kindly
words, and fluttery mothers, quite the pam-
pered suitor. Woodrow baked oven cookies
served with watermelon slices on the side while
Lee, he of a choirboy’s face and demeanor, fash-
ioned a white knick-knack shelf as a gift for me
one Christmas.

On Saturdays, the three of us, Rachelann,

279

Leo Dreu

her brother and I, passed our noons at a down-
town Woolworth’s where you could still buy
sun-gold canaries and carry home angelfish in a
bag. We broke balloons for penny sundaes and
laughed and had a swell time.

Our dates defied the times we were living
in. On the eve of the Beatles’ break-up, I re-
member, we attended an Arthur Fiedler con-
cert and heard the Boston Pops play “Clair de
Lune” and selections from South Pacific. Rachel-
ann wore a hand-made, floor-length gown; I
wore Old Spice cologne.

The week Betty Friedan’s picture appeared
on the cover of Tzme, we visited Amherst and
Dickinson’s grave. We were translating Ovid’s
“The Founding of Rome” during the Wash-
ington Watergate trials.

We took long sojourns on campus, mostly,
sitting on cold, gray, autumn rocks and letting
our feet feed on the leaves. Conversations went
something like this:

“Do you ever miss the ballet?” I would say.

“Naturally not. I have you.”

“What I mean is—am I enough?”

Rachelann would close her eyes. “It is only
right and proper that we should have found one
another. We are practical and live by certain
laws.”

“What laws?”

“Societal laws. The protocol of courtship.
You respect me and I want to keep house for
you. It’s what’s done. Not like the dance. The
dance turned my head, put me up ona cloud. I
was pretty then. I wore banana curls and tiny
bows. I liked the dance. I liked the way I
looked practicing in the mirror with the tulle
stiff and obedient in a circle round my mid-
dle.”’ She would here pause and look me in the
eye. “You didn’t know I know I’m not pretty
anymore, did you? Well, I do. I’m not pretty
anymore. It’s a simple, declarative sentence.
The toe shoes were a dream.”

“Nothing wrong with wanting something
better,” I would say.

Rachelann would shrug it off. “I used to
think I was special.”

“What happened?”

She would fold her hands upon her lap.

“The world laughed at me. It hurt at first but

280

it’s supposed to. It’s for growing up. Oh, these
Harpies with the bells on their ankles, they
make a lot of noise but nothing’s going to
come of it. Not a thing. It isn’t clean, what
they're doing. They don’t see the order. A sim-
ple faith, a tidy kitchen. You follow the rules
because it’s all you can do.”

“And honeymoon at Niagara, I suppose?”

“Just as did our Mothers and Dads.”

“T want to be safe,” I would say.

“And safe you shall be,” she would answer
and motion me permission to kiss her apple
cheek. We anticipated marriage.

I woke one morning hating her.

News of a friend killed in Cambodia took
me like a fever, carried me to a funeral that be-
came, for me, a birth.

Questions began to be asked of me: “What
about your draft card number?” ““What’s your
opinion of the Berrigans?” ““Were you there at
the protest on the ninth?”

I stirred as if from a long, lazy sleep. Like
anyone existing in a time machine, encased,
secure, I had forgotten there was a world be-
yond not able to tolerate my game. I had not
hidden well. Belief in my invisibility had
served to make me all the more opaque. Terri-
fied, angry, I panicked. In my guilt and naked
tardiness, I blamed Rachelann, the shadow
from the past, the princess in the tower. Sanc-
timonious! Phony! Ancient! Prude! What
name didn’t I call her? Not to her face, no, but
in my heart, in the part of me that wanted to
belong. To her face, I mumbled excuses and let
slip curses sotto voce regarding “laws” and “‘ab-
solute propriety.” I wanted out.

“What can I do?” I asked a friend, begging
a solution. “She will take me away from my
time.”

I promised the stars I would change.

But the 1960s ended the morning after I dis-
covered they existed.

I quit my job on impulse and boarded a
Greyhound for the West. I didn’t know where
I was headed or what, specifically, I expected
to find there. I was empty and alien and sought
my fill of highways and revolution. Little did I

san tet oe pee

Rachelann: A Remembrance

know that what I sought had long since
vanished.

No one spoke of “The Movement” anymore,
at least not to me. There were people who
looked like hippies, all colors and hair, but the
few I struck up conversations with talked of
two and three kids and of IBM.

A Dutch girl, pretty and plain in denim,
sat with me for awhile. She, too, she said,
had never made it to the Woodstock Festival,
though she had tried. She offered me granola
and went on tenderly about the Kennedys,
Jack and Bobby. She had brought flowers with
her, asters, to place upon their graves and
longed to sit in ona rally.

Fond of making the peace sign, she did not
understand when fellow passengers saw this
and sneered. Janis Joplin was her idol, she
said, and Oakland, her destination.

We heard and saw nothing of those years,
though, of which we spoke. Disco music
blared from the bus radio and the scenery out-
side consisted of working silos and general
stores. Everywhere, workmen were busy cover-
ing over the polemics of sixties graffiti with
false brick front and latex. Protest and change
had passed to nostalgia. At one point, a guy at
the back of the bus raised three cheers for Dy]-
an but got petered, lazy response. The Dutch

| girl cried. It was an echo of the way the world

had been then.

I stayed on only a night in San Francisco, buy-
ing a return ticket home the next dawn. The
first thing I did, upon my arrival, was to write
to Rachelann. I explained everything as best I
could and apologized for running away. My
sudden departure I blamed on her father, travel
fever, schizophrenia, amnesia, and an over-

whelming sense of history. I prayed she would
forgive.

She would not. Several days later, I received
the following reply:

L,

You are a talented boy and I think you will go
far. I bear you no ill will and wish you the best
life has to offer.

However, there is no doubting that your
bestial abandonment on the night of the 18th
has lowered you considerably in my sights.
Surely you must know you have fallen out of
our good graces.

Perchance, the error was mine. I might have
given more of myself. When and if I ever do
give myself, I realize now it will have to be toa
much more mature and understanding man,
one who will accept the fact that I and my kind
do not want to change.

Really, it all worked out for the best and
since we never truly tasted one another’s
thoughts, we shall never know what we
missed. It’s best you forget.

Never call or write me again. We shall meet
at the place where the sea meets the sky.

Placidly,
Rachelann

Ignoring her requests, I mailed more letters,
even dialed her once, but she calmly refused to
talk with me. I never heard from or saw her
again.

For the sea never really meets the sky. Mu-
tual friends tell me Rachelann retains to this
day the hair style she favored as a girl. The
shelf her brother made me still hangs from my
bedroom wall, only now it hangs crooked and
yellowed and is losing its capacity for holding.

281

GARY SNYDER

Good, Wild,
Sacred

From the original introduction

(Fall 1983):

I first became aware of Gary Snyder
sixteen years ago when I read the
transcript of a four-way discussion
held on Alan Watts’s houseboat
which was published in the Sanz
Francisco Oracle. As Watts, Tim
Leary, and Allen Ginsberg traded
often-romantic observations of the
budding Counterculture back and
forth, Gary Snyder’s voice came
through clearly and attentively, time
and again pulling the discussion (es-
pecially Leary) back to solid ground.
Gary’s poetry, of course, predated
that discussion by at least a decade,
and has remained a stable reference
point for me in the years since. His
feet, happily, are as solidly planted
on the Earth as ever.

This paper on the political and
spiritual implications of our rela-
tions to the land emerged from talks
Gary has given in Sweden, Wyo-
ming, and the United
Kingdom... .

Jay Kinney

282

Gary Snyder wrote several thought-
ful essays for COEVOLUTION QUAR-
TERLY starting around 1982. (Ear-
lier, in 1978, he had coedited the
“poets’ issue.””) Of his essays—one
on the end of urban culture in Sung
Dynasty China, another on the pur-
pose of saying grace—this gathered
the most response. It appeared in Jay
Kinney’s guest-edited section on rec-
onciling politics with religion.

Art Kleiner

I

I live on land in the Sierra Nevada of Alta Cali-
fornia, continent of Turtle Island, which is
somewhat wild and not terribly good. The in-
digenous people there, the Nisenan or South-
ern Maidu, were almost entirely displaced or
destroyed during the first decade of the gold
rush. Consequently we have no one to teach
us which parts of that landscape were once
thought to be sacred, but with much time and
attention, I think we will be able to identify
such sites again. Wild land, sacred land, good
land. At home developing our mountain farm-
stead, in town at political meetings, and far-
ther afield studying the problems of indige-
nous peoples, I hear each of these terms
emerging. By examining these three categories
perhaps we can get some further insights into
the problems of rural habitation, subsistence
living, wilderness preservation, and third- and
fourth-world resistance to the appetites of in-
dustrial civilization.

¢ Wild refers to all unmanipulated unman-
aged natural habitat. Most of the planet in
precivilized times was hospitable to humans—

Good, Wild, Sacred

_ lands covered with bison, mammoths, or prong-
_ horns. Near-climax, high-biomass, perennially
productive, such places were essential expres-
sions of biological nature. Some parts are bet-
_ ter than others in terms of supporting much
| life, with soils rich in nutrients, but even in-
_ hospitable mountain terrain may provide spe-
cial plants or animals of unique value. Knowl-
_ edge is the real key: for a Kalahari bushman, a
_ Pintubi of the west-central Australian desert,
_ ora Ute of the Great Basin, those arid lands
are a life-sustaining home. Many if not all ar-
chaic and nonliterate peoples have also found
some parts of the landscape to be special, “‘sa-
cred,” and have given etiquette and lore to
that. Such spots are of course also wild.

* The idea of Good Land really comes from
_ agriculture. Here good is narrowed to mean
land productive of a much smaller range of fa-
vored cultivars, and thus the opposite of wild,
cultivated. In wild nature there is no disorder:
no plant in the almost endless mosaics of micro
and macro communities is really out of place.
For hunting and gathering peoples who draw
on that spread of richness, a cultivated patch of
land might seem bizarre, and not particularly
good, at least at first. Gathering peoples gather
_ from the whole field, ranging widely daily.
_ Agricultural people live by an inner map made
up of highly productive nodes (cleared fields)
connected by lines (trails through the scary for-
est). A beginning of “linear.”
© In civilized agrarian states the term sacred
was sometimes applied to ritually cultivated
land or special temple fields. The fertility reli-
_ gions of those times were not necessarily re-
_ joicing in the fertility of all nature, but were
- focusing on crops. The concept of cultivation
was extended to describe a kind of training in
lore and manners that guaranteed member-
ship in an elite class. By the metaphor of “‘spir-
itual cultivation” a holy man is one who has
weeded out the wild from his nature. But
weeding out the wild from the natures of
members of the Bos and Sus clans—cattle and
pigs—transformed animals which are intelli-
gent and interesting in the wild into sluggish
meat-making machines. Cultivation at the top

_ rich rain forests, teeming seacoasts, or grass-
!
|

makes domestication and exploitation possible
below.

Wild groves and grottoes lingered on as
shrines in agrarian states, and were viewed
with much ambivalence by the rulers from the
metropole. They survived because the people
who actually worked the land still half-heard
the call of the old ways, and certain folk teach-
ings were still being transmitted that went
back to even before agriculture. The king of Is-
rael began to cut down the sacred groves, and
the Christians finished the job.

The thought that wild might also be sacred
returned to the Occident only with the Ro-
mantic movement. This reappreciation of na-
ture projects a rather vague sense of the sacred,
however. It is only from very old place-centered
cultures that we hear of sacred groves, sacred
land, in a context of genuine belief and
practice.

II

In North America and Australia the original
inhabitants are facing the latest round of in-
cursions into their remotest territories. These
reservations or reserves were left in their use
because the dominant society thought the arc-
tic tundra or arid desert ‘‘no good.” The People
of Australia, Alaska, and elsewhere are vigor-
ously fighting to keep logging or oil explora-
tion or uranium mining out of some of their
landscapes, and not only for the reason that it
is actually their own land, but also because
some places in it are sacred.

So a very cogent and current political issue
rises around the question of the possible sa-
credness of certain spots. I was at the Univer-
sity of Montana in the spring of 1982 ona pro-
gram with Russell Means, the American
Indian Movement founder and activist, who
was trying to get support for the Yellow Thun-
der Camp of Lakota and other Indian people of
the Black Hills on what is currently called For-
est Service land. These Indians wish to block
further expansion of mining into the Black
Hills. They argue that the particular place they
are on is not only ancestral land but sacred.

During his term, former California Gover-
nor Jerry Brown created the Native American

283

Gary Snyder

Heritage Commission specifically for Califor-
nia Indians, and the commission identified a
number of Indian Elders who were charged
with the task of locating and protecting sacred
sites and graves in California. This would avoid
in advance confrontations with landowners or
public land managers. It was a sensitive move,
and though barely comprehensible to the white
voters, it sent a ripple of appreciation through
all the native communities. The white Chris-
tian founders of the United States were proba-
bly not considering American Indian religions
when they guaranteed freedom of religion, but
interpretations by the courts, and the passage
of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act
of 1978, have gradually come to give native
practices some real status. Sacred virtually be-
comes a new land-use category.

III

In the hunting and gathering way of life the
whole territory of a given group is fairly
equally experienced by everyone. It becomes
know for its many plant communities, high
and low terrain, good views, odd-shaped
rocks, dangerous spots, and places made spe-
cial by myth or story. There are places where
women go for seclusion or to give birth, places
the bodies of the dead are taken to. There are
spots where young girls or young boys are
called to for special instruction. Some places
in this territory are recognized as numinous,
loaded with meaning and power. This has hap-
pened to all of us. The memories of such spots
are very long.

I was in Australia in the fall of 1981 at the
invitation of the Australian Aboriginal Arts
Board doing some teaching, poetry readings,
and workshops with aboriginal leaders and
children. Much of the time I was in the central
Australian desert south and west of Alice
Springs, first into Pitjantjara tribal territory,
and then three hundred miles northwest into
Pintubi tribal territory. The aboriginal people
in the central desert all still speak their lan-
guages. Their religion is fairly intact, and
most young men are still initiated at fourteen,
even the ones who go to high school at Alice
Springs. They leave the high school with the
cooperation of the school authorities for a year,

284

and are taken out into the bush to learn bush
ways on foot, to master the lore of landscapes
and plants and animals, and finally to undergo
initiation.

I was traveling by truck over dirt track west
from Alice Springs in the company of a Pin-
tubi elder named Jimmy Tjungurrayi. As we
rolled along the dusty road, sitting in the bed
of a pickup, he began to speak very rapidly to
me. He was talking about a mountain over
there, telling mea story about some wallabies
that came to that mountain in the dreamtime
and got into some kind of mischief there with
some lizard girls. He had hardly finished that
and he started in on another story about an-
other hill over here and another story over
there. I couldn’t keep up. I realized after about
half an hour of this that these were tales to be
told while walking, and that I was experiencing
a speeded-up version of what might be lei-
surely told over several days of foot-travel. Mr.
Tjungurrayi felt graciously compelled to share
a body of lore with me by virtue simply of the
fact that I was there.

So remember a time when you journeyed on
foot over hundreds of miles, walking fast and
often traveling at night, traveling night-long
and napping in the acacia shade during the
day, and these stories were told to you as you
went. In your travels with an older person you
were given a map you could memorize, full of
the lore and song, and also practical informa-
tion. Off by yourself you could sing those
songs to bring yourself back. And you could
maybe travel to a place that you'd never been,
steering only by songs you had learned.

We made camp at a waterhole called IIpili
and rendezvoused with a number of Pintubi
people from the surrounding desert country.
The I] pili waterhole is about a yard across, six
inches deep, ina little swale of bush full of
finch. The People camp a quarter-mile away.
It’s the only waterhole that stays full through
drought years in several thousand square miles.
A place kept by custom, I am told, welcome
and open to all. Through the night, until one
or two in the morning, Jimmy Tjungurrayi
and the other old men sat and sang a cycle of
journey songs, walking through a space of de-
sert in imagination and song. They stopped

|

Good, Wild, Sacred

between songs and would hum a phrase or two
and then would argue a bit about the words
and then would start again, and someone
would defer to another person and would let
him start. Jimmy explained to me that they
have so many cycles of journey songs they can’t
quite remember them all, and that they have to
be constantly rehearsing them. Night after
night they say, “What will we sing tonight?”
“Let’s sing the walk up to Darwin.” They'll
start out and argue their way along through it,
and stop when it gets too late to go any farther.
I asked Jimmy, “Well how far did you get last
night?” He said, “Well we got two-thirds of
the way to Darwin.” This is a way to transmit
information about vast terrain which is ob-
viously very effective, and doesn’t require writ-
ing. Some of the places thus defined will also

__ be presented as sacred.

One day driving near [pili we stopped
the truck and Jimmy and three other elderly
gentlemen got out and said, “We'll take you
Out to see a sacred place here.” And, “I guess

_ you're old enough.” They turned to the young

boys and said that uninitiated boys couldn’t go
there. As we climbed the hill these ordinarily
cheery and loud-talking aboriginal men began
to drop their voices. As we got higher up the
hill they were speaking in whispers, their
whole manner changed. They said, in a whis-
per, “Now we are coming close.” Then they

got on their hands and knees and crawled. We
crawled up the last two hundred feet, over a

little rise into an area of broken and oddly

_ shaped rocks. They whispered to us with re-

spect and awe of what was there and its story.

Then we all backed away. We got back down

the hill and at a certain point stood and
walked. At another point voices rose. Back at
the truck, everybody was talking loud again
and no more mention was made of the sacred
place.

Very powerful. Very much in mind. We
learned later that it was a place where young
men were taken for instruction and for
initiation.

IV

So the nature of the “sacred place” in Australia
began to define itself as special rocks, beauti-

ful, steep defiles where two cliffs almost meet
with maybe just a little sand bed between, a
place where many parrots are nesting in the
rock walls, or a place where a blade of rock
stands on end balancing, thirty feet tall, by a
waterhole. Each of them was out of the ordi-
nary, a little fantastic even, and they were
places of teaching. Often they had picto-
graphs, left by past human ancestors. In some
cases they were also what are called “dreaming
spots’’ for certain totem ancestors. “Dreaming”
or ““dreamtime’”’ refers to a time of creation
which is not in the past but which is here right
now. It’s the mode of eternally creative now-
ness, as contrasted with the mode of cause and
effect in time, where modern people mainly
live, and within which we imagine history,
progress, evolution to take place. The totem
dreaming place is first of all special to the peo-
ple of that totem, who sometimes make pil-
grimages there. Second, it is sacred to the
honey-ants (say) which actually live there.
There are a lot of honey-ants there. Third, it’s
like a little Platonic cave of ideal honey-ant
forms. (I’m imagining this now. I’m trying to
explain what all these things seem to be.) It’s
the archetypal honey-ant spot. In fact, it’s
optimal honey-ant habitat. A green parrot
dreaming place, with the tracks of ancestors
going across the landscape and stopping at the
green parrot dreaming place, is a perfect green
parrot nesting spot. So the sacredness comes
together with a sense of optimal habitat of cer-
tain kinfolk that we have out there—the walla-
bies, red kangaroo, bush turkeys, lizards. Rob-
ert Bliney sums it up this way: “The land itself
was their chapel and their shrines were hills
and creeks and their religious relics were ani-
mals, plants and birds. Thus the migrations of
aboriginals, though spurred by economic need,
were also always pilgrimages.” Good (produc-
tive of much life), wild (naturally), and in
these cases, sacred, were indeed one.

This way of life is going on right now,
threatened by Japanese and other uranium
mining, large-scale copper mining, and petro-
leum exploration throughout the deserts. The
issue of sacredness is a very real political ques-
tion, so much so that the Australian Bureau of
Aboriginal Affairs has hired some bilingual an-

285

Gary Snyder

thropologists and bush people to work with el-
ders of the different tribes to identify sacred
sites and map them. Everyone hopes that the
Australian government really means to declare
such areas off-limits before any exploratory
team ever gets near them. This effort is spurred
by the fact that there have already been some
confrontations in the Kimberley region over oil
exploration. This was at Nincoomba. The Peo-
ple very firmly stood their ground and made
human lines in the front of bulldozers and
drilling rigs, and won the support of the Aus-
tralian public. Since then the Australian gov-
ernment has been more careful. In Australian
land ownership, mineral rights are always re-
served to “The Crown” so that even a private
ranch is subject to mining. To consider sacred
land a special category in Australia is a very ad-
vanced move, at least in theory. But recently a
“registered sacred site” was bulldozed near Al-
ice Springs, supposedly on instructions of a
government land minister, and this is in the
relatively benign federal government jurisdic-
tion! The state of Queensland is a minifascist
nation to itself, favored by emigrants from
white South Africa.

Vv

The original inhabitants of Japan, the Ainu,
can see a whole system as in a very special sense
sacred. Their term zworu means “‘field” with
implications of watershed, plant and animal
life, and spirit force. They speak of the zworu of
the great brown bear. By that they mean the
mountain habitat and watershed territory in
which brown bear is dominant. They also
speak of the zworu of the salmon, which means
the lower watersheds with all their tributaries
and the plant communities along those valleys
that focus on the streams where salmon run.
The bear field, the deer field, the salmon field,
the orca (killer whale) field. To give a little pic-
ture of how this world works, a human house is
up a valley by a stream, facing east. In the cen-
ter of the house is the fire. The sunshine
streams through the eastern door each morning
to contact the fire, and they say the sun god-
dess is visiting her sister the fire goddess in the
firepit. They communicate for a moment. One
must not step across the sunbeams that shine

286

in the morning on the firepit; that would be
breaking their contact.

Food comes from the inner mountains and
from the deeps of the sea. The lord of the deeps
of the sea is Orca or Killer Whale, the lord of
the inner mountains is Bear. Bear sends his
friends the deer down to visit us. Killer Whale
sends his friends the salmon up the streams to
visit us. When they come to visit us we kill
them, to enable them to get out of their fur or
scale coats, and then we entertain them be-
cause they love music. We sing songs to them,
and we eat them. Having been delighted by
the songs they heard, they return to the deep
sea and to the inner mountains, and they re-
port to their spirit friends there, “We had
a wonderful time with the human beings.
There’s lots to eat, lots to drink, and they
played music for us.” The other ones say, “Oh,
let’s go visit the human beings.” If the people
do not neglect the proper hospitality, the mu-
sic and manners, when entertaining their deer
or salmon or wild plant-food visitors, the
beings will be reborn and return over and over.
This is a sort of spiritual game management.

VI

The Ainu were probably the original inhabi-
tants of all of Japan. They certainly left many
place-names behind and many traces on the
landscape. Modern Japan is another sort of ex-
ample: a successful industrialized country,
with remnants of sacred land-consciousness
still intact. There are Shinto shrines through-
out Japan. Shinto is “the way of the spirits.”
By spzrits the Japanese mean exactly what
almost all people of the world have always
meant: spirits are formless little powers present
in everything to some degree but intensified in
power and in presence in outstanding objects,
such as large curiously twisted rocks, very old
trees, or thundering misty waterfalls. Anoma-
lies and beauties of the landscape are all signs
of kami—-spirit power, spirit presence, energy.
The greatest of all the kamz, or spirit forces of
Japan, is Mt. Fuji. The name Fuji is now
thought to be an old Ainu placename meaning
“fire goddess.’ All of Mt. Fuji is a Shinto
shrine, the largest in the nation, from well be-
low timberline all the way to the summit.

Good, Wild, Sacred

Shinto got a bad name during the 30s and
World War II because the Japanese govetn-
ment created a “State Shinto” in the service of
militarism and nationalism. Long before the
rise of any state, the islands of Japan were
studded with little shrines—jznja or miya—
part of the expression of Neolithic village cul-
ture. Even in the midst of the enormous on-
rushing industrial energy of the current sys-
tem, shrine lands remain untouchable. It
would make your hair stand up to see how the
Japanese will take bulldozers to a nice slope
of pines and level it for a new development.
When the New Island was created in Kobe
harbor, to make Kobe the second busiest port
in the world (next to Rotterdam), it was raised
from the bay bottom with dirt obtained by
shaving down a range of hills ten miles south
of the city. This was barged to the site for
twelve years, a steady stream of barges carrying
dirt off giant conveyor belts, totally removing
soil two ranges back from the coast. That lev-
eled area was then used for a housing develop-
ment. In the industrial world it’s not that
“nothing is sacred,” it’s that the sacred is sa-
cred and that’s a// that’s sacred. We are grate-
ful for the little bit of Japanese salvaged land
because the rule in shrine lands is that (away
from the buildings and paths) you never cut
anything, never maintain anything, never clear
or thin anything. No hunting, no fishing, no
thinning, no burning, no stopping of burning.

Thus pockets of climax forests here and
there, right inside the city, and one can walk
into a shrine and be in the presence of an eight-
hundred-year-old cryptomeria tree. Without
shrines we wouldn’t know so well what Japa-
nese forests might have been. But such com-
partmentalization is not healthy: in this model
some land is saved, like a virgin priestess,
some is overworked endlessly like a wife, and
some is brutally publicly reshaped, like an exu-
berant girl declared promiscuous and pun-
ished. Good, wild, and sacred couldn’t be
farther apart.

VII

Europe and the Middle East inherit from Neo-
lithic and Paleolithic times many shrines. The
most sacred spot of all Europe was perhaps the

caves of southern France, in the Pyrenees. We
shall say that they were the great shrines of
twenty thousand years ago, the center of a reli-
gious complex in which the animals were
brought underground. Maybe a dreaming
place. Maybe a thought that the archetypal
animal forms were thereby stored under the
Earth, a way of keeping animals from becom-
ing extinct. But many species did become ex-
tinct. Most became so during the last two
thousand years, victims of the imperium, of
civilization, in its particularly destructive
western form. The degradation of wild habitat
and extinction of species, the impoverishment
and enslavement of rural people and subsis-
tence economies, and the burning alive of na-
ture-worship traditions were perfected right
within Europe.

So the French and English explorers of
North America and then the early fur traders
and hunters had no traditions from the cultures
they left behind that would urge them to look
on wild land with reverence. They did find
much that was awe-inspiring; some joined the
Indians and the land and became people of
place. These few almost forgotten exceptions
were overwhelmed by fur-trade entrepreneurs
and, later, farmers. Yet many kept joining the
Indians in fact or in style—grieving for a wil-
derness they saw shrinking away. In the Far
East, or Europe, a climax forest or prairie, and
all the splendid creatures that live there, is a
tale from the Neolithic. In the western United
States it was our grandmothers’ world. For
many of us, without intellectualization or
question, this loss is a source of grief. For Na-
tive Americans this loss is a loss of land, life,
and culture.

Vill

It is of course not evil, to, as Thoreau did,
“make the soil say beans’’—to cause it to be
productive to our own notion—but we must
also ask, what does mother nature do best here
when left to her own long strategies? This
comes to asking, what would the climax vege-
tation of this spot be? For all land, however
long wasted and exploited, if left to nature,
the tzuran, “‘self-so” of Taoism, will arrive at a
point of balance between biological productiv-

287

Gary Snyder

ity and stability. A truly sophisticated post-in-
dustrial ‘future primitive” agriculture will be
asking: Is there any way we can go with rather
than against a natural tendency toward, say,
deciduous hardwoods—or as where I live, a
mix of pine and oak with kitkitdizze ground
cover? Such a condition in many cases might
be best for human interests too, and even in
the short run.

Wesley Jackson’s research indicates that a
perennial and horticultural-based agriculture
holds real promise for sustaining the locally
appropriate communities of the future. This is
acknowledging that the source of fertility ulti-
mately is the “wild.” It has been said that
“good soil is good because of the wildness in
it.” How could this be granted by a victorious
king dividing up his spoils? (Spanish land
grants—Royal/Real estate?) In my imagina-
tion the God/dess that gives us land is none
other than Gaia herself: the whole network.

It might be that almost all civilized agricul-
ture has been on the wrong path from the be-
ginning, relying on the relative monoculture
of annuals. In New Roots for Agriculture Wes
Jackson develops this argument. I concur with
his view, knowing that it raises even larger
questions about civilization itself, a critique I
have worked at elsewhere. Suffice it to say that
the sorts of economic and social organization
we invoke when we say “civilization” can no
longer be automatically accepted as useful
models. To scrutinize civilization as Dr. Stan-
ley Diamond has in In Search of the Primitive is
not, however, to negate all varieties of culture
or cultivation.

The word cw/tivation in civilization, harking
to etymologies of tz// and wheel about, generally
implies a movement away from natural pro-
cess. Both materially and psychologically, it is
a matter of ‘arresting succession, establishing
monoculture.” Applied on the spiritual plane
this has meant austerities, obedience to reli-
gious authority, long bookish scholarship, ora
dualistic devotionalism (sharply distinguishing
“creature and creator’) and an overriding met-
aphor of divinity being “centralized,” just as a
secular ruler of a civilized state is at the cen-
ter—of wealth, of the metropole, of political

288

power. A Divine King. The efforts entailed in
such a spiritual practice are sometimes a sort of
war against nature—placing the human over
the animal, the “‘spiritual’’ over the human.
The most sophisticated modern variety of this
sort of thought is found in the works of Father
Teilhard de Chardin, who claims a special evo-
lutionary spiritual destiny for humanity under
the name of higher consciousness. Some of the
more extreme of these Spiritual Darwinists
would willingly leave the rest of Earth-bound
animal and plant life behind to enter a realm
transcending biology. The anthropocentrism of
some New Age thinkers is countered by the
radical critique of the deep ecology movement.

IX

Yet there is such a thing as training. The natu-
ral world moves by process, and by comple-
mentarities of young and old, foolish and wise,
ripe or green, raw or cooked. Animals too learn
self-discipline and caution in the face of desire
and availability. There is learning and training
that goes with the grain of things. In early
Chinese Taoism, “training” did not mean to
cultivate the wildness out of oneself, but to do
away with arbitrary and delusive condition-
ing—false social values distorting an essen-
tially free and correct human nature. Bud-
dhism takes a middle way, allowing as how
greed, hatred, and stupidity are part of the
given conditions of human nature, but seeing
organized society, civilization, “the world” as
being a force that inflames, panders to, or ex-
ploits these weaknesses in the fledgling hu-
man. Greed exposes the foolish person or the
foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk
of the food-web, and to early impermanence.
It’s interesting to note that preliterate hunting
and gathering cultures lived well by virtue of
knowledge and a quiet sort of manipulation of
systems. We know how the people of Meso-
lithic Britain selectively cleared or burned, in
the valley of the Thames, as a way to encourage
the growth of hazel. An almost invisible horti-
culture was once practiced in the jungles of
Guatemala. The spiritual equivalent of nature-
enhancing practices can be seen in those sha-
manistic disciplines which open the neophyte’s

Good, Wild, Sacred

_ mind to the fascinating wild territory, the
Unconscious. ;

We can all agree: there is a problem with the
chaotic, self-seeking human ego. Is it a mirror
of the wild and of nature? I think not: for civi-
lization itself is ego gone to seed and institu-
tionalized in the form of the State, both East-
ern and Western. It is not nature-as-chaos
_ which threatens us (for nature is orderly) but
ignorance of the real natural world, the myth of
progress, and the presumption of the State that
it has created order. That sort of “order” is an
elaborate rationalization of the greed of a few.

Now we can look again at what sacred land
might be. For a people of an old culture, a//

_ their mutually owned territory holds numi-
nous life and spirit. Certain spots are of high
spiritual density because of their perceived ani-
_ mal or plant habitat peculiarities, or associa-
tions with legend and perhaps with human an-
cestry via totemic systems, or because of their
geomorphological anomaly and formal inten-
sity, or because of their association with spiri-
tual training, or some combination of the
above. These spots are seen as points on the
landscape at which one can more easily enter a
_ larger-than-human, larger-than-personal,

| realm.

xX

Nowadays some present-day inhabitants of

_ Turtle Island, and many Europeans, join with

_ the native peoples of the world in a rather new

_ political and economic movement concerned

_ with “the ecology.” Stephen Fox says it is also

_ probably a new religion, so new that it has not

_ been called such yet. Though sometimes at-

tacked as being an elitist movement (even by

_ the Reagan administration!) the growing pop-
ularity of the Earth First! organization and its
“Rednecks for Wilderness’ bumpersticker in
blue-collar areas shows this to be not true. The
temples of this movement are the planet’s re-
maining wilderness areas. When we enter
them on foot we can sense that the kami or
(Maidu) &uvkini have fled here for refuge, as
have the mountain lions, mountain sheep, and
grizzlies. (Those three North American ant-

_ mals were found throughout the lower hills

and plains in prewhite times.) The rocky icy
grandeur of the high country reminds us of the
overarching wild systems that nourish us all—
even an industrial economy, for in the sterile
beauty of mountain snowfields and glaciers be-
gin the little streams that water the huge agri-
business fields of the San Joaquin Valley of Cal-
ifornia. The backpacker-pilgrim’s step-by-
step, breath-by-breath walk up a trail, carry-
ing all on the back, is so ancient a set of ges-
tures as to trigger perennial images and a pro-
found sense of body-mind joy.

Not just backpackers, of course. The same
happens to those who sail in the ocean, kayak
rivers, tend a garden, even sit on a meditation
cushion. The point is in making intimate con-
tact with wild world, wild self. Sacred refers to
that which helps take us out of our little selves
into the larger self of the whole universe.

Inspiration, exaltation, insight do not end,
however, when one steps outside the doors of
the church. The wilderness as a temple is only
a beginning. That is: one should not dwell in
the specialness of the extraordinary experience,
not leave the political world behind to be ina
state of heightened insight. The best purpose
of such studies and backpack hikes is to be able
to come back into the present world to see all
the land about us, agricultural, suburban, ur-
ban, as part of the same giant realm of pro-
cesses and beings—never totally ruined, never
completely unnatural. Great Brown Bear is
walking with us, salmon swimming upstream
with us, as we stroll a city street.

XI

To return to my own situation: the land my
family and I live on in the Sierra Nevada of
California is “barely good” from an economic
standpoint. With soil amendments, much la-
bor, and the development of ponds for water-
ing, it is producing a few vegetables and some
good apples. As forest soils go it is better:
through the millennia it has excelled at grow-
ing oak and pine trees. I guess I should admit
that it’s better left wild. It’s being “managed
for wild” right now—the pines are getting
large again and some of the oaks were growing
here before a white man set foot anywhere in

289

Gary Snyder

California. The deer and all the other animals
move through with the exception of grizzly
bear; grizzlies are now extinct in California.
We dream sometimes of trying to bring them
back.

These foothill ridges are not striking in any
special way, no great scenery or rocks—but the
deer are so at home here, I think it might be a
“deer field.” And the fact that my neighbors
and J and all of our children have learned so
much by taking our place in the Sierra foot-
hills—not striking wilderness, but logged-
over land, burned-over land, considered worth-
less for decades—begins to make it a teacher to
us. A place on Earth we work with, struggle
with, where we stick out the summers and
winters. And it has showed us a little of its
power.

But this use of “teacher” is still a newcom-
er’s metaphor. By our grandchildren’s time
there may begin to be a culture of place again
in America. How does this work? First, a child
must experience that bonding to place that has
always touched many of us deeply: a small per-
sonal territory one can run to, a secret “fort,” a
place of never-forgotten smells and sounds, a
refuge away from home. Second, one must
continue to live in a place, to not move away,
and to continue walking the paths and roads.
A child’s walking the land is a veritable exer-
cise in “expanding consciousness.” Third, one
must have human teachers, who can name and
explain the plants, who know the life cycle of
an area. Fourth, one must draw some little part
of one’s livelihood from the breadth of the
landscape: spotting downed trees for next
year’s firewood, gathering mushrooms or ber-
ries or herbs on time, fishing, hunting,
scrounging. Fifth, one must learn to listen.
Then the voice can be heard. The nature spirits

290

are never dead, they are alive under our feet,
over our heads, all around us, ready to speak
when we are silent and centered. So what is
this “‘voice’’? Just the cry of a flicker, or coyote,
or jay, or wind ina tree, or acorn whack ona
garage roof. Nothing mysterious, but now
you re home.

Fine, and what about right now? As Peter
Nabokov says, goodhearted environmentalists
can turn their backs on a save-the-wilderness
project when it gets too tiresome and return to
a city home. But inhabitory people, he says,
will “fight for their lives like they've been
jumped in an alley.” Like it or not, we are a//
finally ‘‘inhabitory” on this one small blue-
green planet. It’s the only one with comforta-
ble temperatures, good air and water, and a
wealth of living beings for millions (or quad-
rillions) of miles. A little waterhole in the Vast
Space, a nesting place, a place of singing and
practice, a place of dreaming. It’s on the verge
of being totally trashed—there’s a slow way
and a fast way. It’s clearly time to put hege-
monial controversies aside, to turn away from
economies that demand constant exploitation
of both people and resources, and to put Earth
first!

As the most numerous, ambitious, and
“musical” (as the Ainu would say) sort of the
larger mammals, human beings might well
awaken to their great possible place in the bio-
sphere as sensitive transformers. We might
someday initiate a more sophisticated dialogue
between the poles of cultivation and original
nature, technology and the self-born, produc-
tion and reproduction, than has ever been
imagined before. These possibilities go far be-
yond any fantasies of high-tech. I’m thinking
of a condition where wild, sacred, and good
will be one and the same, again.

SALLIE TISDALE

Handfast

Sallie Tisdale introduced herself to
COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY in Sum-
mer 1983 by sending in an essay
called “Women’s Work,” about what
gets lost when nursing is forced from
“menial, demanding, dirty work,
with low wages and little status”
into a professional job. Since then
she’s appeared in nearly every CQ.
This piece, which Stewart later said
“has almost become a cult item
among parents,” appeared in Winter
1983. At twenty-eight, Sallie has
the kind of thoughtfulness and skill
at phrasing which can convey to
readers the sense of listening toa
perceptive friend. When not writing
she supports herself as a registered
nurse—most recently at Reed Col-
lege, Oregon. Her book on “‘pa-
tients’ experiences with medical
technology” was published by Mc-
Graw-Hill in January 1986.

Art Kleiner

One factor determines all else about our rela-
tionship with our children: it is irreversible.
The contract cannot be broken. Daily we leave
jobs, houses, friends, lovers, but the child al-
ways comes along.

|

When the going is rough—when we don’t
like each other—my son and I can’t call it
quits and cut our losses. I can’t pack a bag,
make a break for it, perhaps find a more com-
patible child. Were it even the remotest of pos-
sibilities, everything else would change.

So I take risks with him I would never dare
take with anyone else. I treat him badly, with
rough impatience, with all the bile I hide from
friends and lovers for fear of losing them. Iam
less tolerant of deviation and idiosyncrasies
with him. We fight—bitterly—then, sad and
weary of it, make up with a tentative kiss. I
demand so much: love, loyalty, obedience, at-
tention, and faith to a degree few adults would
allow me to approach. For the most part in
these early years, I get what I demand—de-
serving Or not.

He is tied and bound to me. We are entan-
gled. When I wake from a bad dream without
a sound, he wakes in the next room and cries
for me. As a baby, his cry could make my
breasts run with milk, his weight missing
from my arms left me restless and sore. I
watched the babyfat melt and muscles emerge
from the perfect downy skin. I watch the fea-
tures smooth over, change, gradually hiding
the newborn between cheek and chin some-
where. He is the flesh of my flesh that lovers
promise and can’t deliver.

Yet he is hardly conscious of the intimacy.
Later, when he wakes to his own appetites,
others’ hands—strangers’ hands—will stroke
where I stroke now. I am jealous of this future
secret-sharing apart from me, jealous of the re-
sponse those hands will provoke.

Between us, yet, is no shame, no inhibition.
He thinks me beautiful; he wants to grow to
be like me. And I am bound to fail him, and

291

Sallie Tisdale

bound to lose him. Daily the gap between us
grows. He is not mindful of it—but Iam. Oh,
Iam.

For many years, unremembered years, our
children have only the vaguest notion of their
separateness from us. We are an immutable
and invariable framework in their lives, a per-
petual foundation. Therefore they treat us with
an abominable negligence and come one day,
hat in hand, to claim themselves and leave.
They grow into strangers certain to disappoint
and perplex us, having long before wakened to
disillusionment with us. They seem oblivious
to our loss—after all, they’ve lost nothing. We
are only their parents. And haven’t we done all
this before?

I treat my own mother with an offhand and
rather inattentive disregard. She is, after all,
my mother. She is always there, and I am al-
ways her child, as my son is my child, first,
forever and ever.

Could she ever have felt this same fierce pro-
tective love for me? It seems she should be
grieved, bereft, if that is so. Iam far away from
her. I cling to my son; this ordinary woman
chats of relatives and the weather. What could
she be hiding, inarticulate, beneath mundane
conversation?

I may never know. Affection embarrasses us.
A lump comes to my throat when my mother
and I move close to each other; we both feel re-
lief when the contact is averted. Will it be the
same for my son and me, who now crawls like a
spoiled child-prince across my lap? How could
such ease be forgotten, to become the shy si-
lence between my mother and me?—though |
know she is like a limb to me, a vital organ.

She shows up, surprising me, in my words
to my son. I repeat what she told me, the
phrases and platitudes, in the same tone of
voice and inflection I heard as a child. We all
have vowed to do it differently, to be unlike
our parents, and the most we can manage is a
variation.

Will my son, then, repeat me, as I my
mother and she my grandmother? I become
part of his inheritance, and will prevail despite

292

his efforts. Even when he’s gone and busy for-
getting me I'll show up, surprising him. He'll
try to throw me off, the monkey on his back.

Pll grow old on him. The trick of parents
through the ages—we turn again into chil-
dren. “When I grow up,” he tells me, “you'll
be my baby.” Yes, I smile. Yes, if only you
knew, my son. I have put my grandmother on
the toilet, to bed, consigned to death. Perhaps
I'll do the same for my mother in her time.
Perhaps one day I'll lie in bed, watching this
smooth-faced boy fold my diapers, and see in
him a gesture that reminds me of myself once
young. But now he remains under my still-
strong wing, unconcerned.

This frightful responsibility! I invited it,
and IJ carry it out in a workaday way. But I
quail secretly at the number of mistakes I’m
bound to make, what I'll saddle him with,
what the price for both of us will finally be. I'll
give the world a son, heavy with the grief of
giving him at all. Then and after, he’ll drift in
and out of my view, keeping secrets, neglect-
ing me, while I watch from a distance,
unrequited.

Postscript: He’s seven now; this essay is more
than four years old. I am still taken aback by
the strength of feeling, by the subtle, unex-
pected turns of the heart. An old friend re-
cently became a father for the first time, after
years of saying he never would. Right before
the birth he told me, “The thing that scares
me most about being a parent is that I’m cer-
tain to fail at it. There’s just no way to do it
perfectly.” All I could say was Yes.

I’ve had seven years to fear his death, too.
When he’s sleeping, arms flung out and smug
smile on his soft face, I can believe I’ve created
something true and enduring. I can believe
then in perfection. And when I fear his death,
when I contemplate the space he takes up, and
how vast its emptiness would be, I know that
most of all I'd miss him sleeping. My greatest
challenge is to feel that sweetness, and that
sorrow, through and through.

|
|

IVAN ILLICH

Silence Is
a Commons

Ivan Illich has become civilization’s
best critic. No one else has his
range—education, energy, medi-
cine, Communications, economics,
gender, dwelling (De-Schooling Soct-
ety, 1971; Energy and Equity, 1974;
Medical Nemesis, 1975; Vernacular
Gender, 1983). No one else is simul-
taneously so radical (original, pene-
trating), so conservative (protective
of the native, the vernacular), or so
theoretically consistent. Everywhere
the chill of human institutions
threatens the warmth of human life,
Ivan Illich eventually shows up with
his wolf grin. Here, from the Win-
ter 1983 issue, with computers. This
article is from IIlich’s remarks at the
“Asahi Symposium: Science and
Man—The Computer-Managed So-
ciety,” Tokyo, Japan, March 21,
1982. .

Stewart Brand

Minna-san, gladly I accept the honor of ad-
dressing this forum on Science and Man. The
theme that Mr. Tsuru proposes, ““The Com-

puter-Managed Society,” sounds an alarm.
Clearly you foresee that machines which ape
people are tending to encroach on every aspect
of people’s lives, and that such machines force
people to behave like machines. The new elec-
tronic devices do indeed have the power to
force people to “communicate” with them and
with each other on the terms of the machine.
Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of
machines is effectively filtered from a culture
dominated by their use.

The machine-like behavior of people
chained to electronics constitutes a degradation
of their well-being and of their dignity which,
for most people in the long run, becomes in-
tolerable. Observations of the sickening effect
of programmed environments show that peo-
ple in them become indolent, impotent, nar-
cissistic, and apolitical. The political process
breaks down, because people cease to be able to
govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

I congratulate Asahi Shimbun on its efforts
to foster a new democratic consensus in Japan,
by which your more than seven million readers
become aware of the need to limit the en-
croachment of machines on the style of their
own behavior. It is important that precisely Ja-
pan initiate such action. Japan is looked upon
as the capital of electronics; it would be mar-
velous if it became for the entire world the
model of a new politics of self-limitation in
the field of communication, which, in my
opinion, is henceforth necessary if a people
wants to remain self-governing.

Electronic management as a political issue
can be approached in several ways. I propose,
at the beginning of this public consultation, to
approach the issue as one of political ecology.
Ecology, during the last ten years, has acquired

293

Ivan Illich

anew meaning. It is still the name for a branch
of professional biology, but the term now in-
creasingly serves as the label under which a
broad, politically organized general public
analyzes and influences technical decisions. I
want to focus on the new electronic manage-
ment devices as a technical change of the hu-
man environment which, to be benign, must
remain under political (and not exclusively ex-
pert) control. I have chosen this focus for my
introduction, because I thus continue my con-
versation with those three Japanese colleagues
to whom I owe what I know about your coun-
try—Professors Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Joshiro
Tamanoi, and Jun U1.

In the thirteen minutes still left to me on
this rostrum I will clarify a distinction that I
consider fundamental to political ecology. I
shall distinguish the environment as commons
from the environment as resource. On our ability
to make this particular distinction depends not
only the construction of a sound theoretical
ecology, but also—and more importantly—ef-
fective ecological jurisprudence.

Minna-san, how I wish, at this point, that
I were a pupil trained by your Zen poet, the
great Basho. Then perhaps in a bare seventeen
syllables I could express the distinction be-
tween the commons within which people’s sub-
sistence activities are embedded, and resources
that serve for the economic production of those
commodities on which modern survival de-
pends. If I were a poet, perhaps I would make
this distinction so beautifully and incisively
that it would penetrate your hearts and remain
unforgettable. Unfortunately I am not a Japa-
nese poet. I must speak to you in English, a
language that during the last hundred years
has lost the ability to make this distinction,
and—in addition—I must speak through
translation. Only because I may count on the
translating genius of Mr. Muramatsu do I dare
to recover Old English meanings with a talk in
Japan.

“Commons” is an Old English word. Ac-
cording to my Japanese friends, it is quite close
to the meaning that zrzaz still has in Japanese.
“Commons,” like zriaz, is a word which, in

294

preindustrial times, was used to designate cer-
tain aspects of the environment. People called
commons those parts of the environment for
which customary law exacted specific forms of
community respect. People called commons
that part of the environment which lay beyond
their own thresholds and outside of their own
possessions, to which, however, they had rec-
ognized claims of usage, not to produce com-
modities but to provide for the subsistence of
their households. The customary law which
humanized the environment by establishing
the commons was usually unwritten. It was
unwritten law not only because people did not
care to write it down, but because what it pro-
tected was a reality much too complex to fit
into paragraphs. The law of the commons reg-
ulates the right of way, the right to fish and to
hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medici-
nal plants in the forest.

An oak tree might be in the commons. Its
shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd
and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the
pigs of the neighboring peasants; its dry
branches serve as fuel for the widows of the vil-
lage; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are
cut as ornaments for the church—and at sunset
it might be the place for the village assembly.
When people spoke about commons, zriai,
they designated an aspect of the environment
that was limited, that was necessary for the
community’s survival, that was necessary for
different groups in different ways, but which,
in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as
scarce.

When today, in Europe, with university
students I use the term ““commons’” (in Ger-
man A/mende or Gemeinheit, in Italian gli usz
civict) my listeners immediately think of the
eighteenth century. They think of those pas-
tures in England on which villagers each kept a
few sheep, and they think of the “enclosure of
the pastures” which transformed the grassland
from commons into a resource on which com-
mercial flocks could be raised. Primarily, how-
ever, my students think of the innovation of
poverty which came with enclosure: of the ab-
solute impoverishment of the peasants, who

Silence Is a Commons

were driven from the land and into wage labor,
and they think of the commercial enrichment
of the lords.

In their immediate reaction, my students
think of the rise of a new capitalist order. Fac-
ing that painful newness, they forget that en-
closure also stands for something more basic.
The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a
new ecological order. Enclosure did not just phys-
ically transfer the control over grasslands from
the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a
radical change in the attitudes of society to-
wards the environment. Before, in any juridi-
cal system, most of the environment had been
considered as commons from which most peo-
ple could draw most of their sustenance with-
out needing to take recourse to the market.
After enclosure the environment became pri-
marily a resource at the service of “enterprises”
which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed
nature into the goods and services on which the
satisfaction of basic needs by consumers de-
pends. This transformation is in the blind spot
of political economy.

This change of attitudes can be illustrated
better if we think about roads rather than
about grasslands. What a difference there was
between the new and the old parts of Mexico
City only twenty years ago. In the old parts of
the city the streets were true commons. Some
people sat on the road to sell vegetables and
charcoal. Others put their chairs on the road to
drink coffee or tequila. Others held their meet-
ings on the road to decide on the new headman
for the neighborhood or to determine the price
of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys
through the crowd, walking next to the heav-
ily-loaded beasts of burden; others sat in the
saddle. Children played in the gutter, and still
people walking could use the road to get from
one place to another.

Such roads were built for people. Like any
true commons, the street itself was the result
of people living there and making that space
livable. The dwellings that lined the roads
were not private homes in the modern sense—
garages for the overnight deposit of workers.
The threshold still separated two living spaces,

one intimate and one common. But neither
homes in this intimate sense nor streets as
commons survived economic development.

In the new sections of Mexico City, streets
are no more for people. They are now roadways
for automobiles, for buses, for taxis, cars, and
trucks. People are barely tolerated on the
streets unless they are on their way to a bus
stop. If people now sat down or stopped on the
street, they would become obstacles for traffic,
and traffic would be dangerous to them. The
road has been degraded from a commons to a
simple resource for the circulation of vehicles.
People can circulate no more on their own.
Traffic has displaced their mobility. They can
circulate only when they are strapped down
and are moved.

The appropriation of the grassland by the
lords was challenged, but the more fundamen-
tal transformation of grassland (or of roads)
from commons to resource has happened, until
recently, without being subjected to criticism.
The appropriation of the environment by the
few was clearly recognized as an intolerable
abuse. By contrast, the even more degrading
transformation of people into members of an
industrial /abor force and into consumers was
taken, until recently, for granted. For almost a
hundred years the majority of political parties
has challenged the accumulation of environ-
mental resources in private hands. However,
the issue was argued in terms of the private
utilization of these resources, not the distinc-
tion of commons. Thus anticapitalist politics
so far have bolstered the legitimacy of trans-
forming commons into resources.

Only recently, at the base of society a new
kind of “popular intellectual” is beginning to
recognize what has been happening. Enclosure
has denied the people the right to that &znd of
environment on which—throughout all of
history—the moral economy of survival had been
based. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines
community. Enclosure undermines the local
autonomy of community. Enclosure of the
commons is thus as much in the interest of
professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in
the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the

295

Ivan Illich

bureaucrat to define local community as im-
portant—‘‘e7-e7, schau-schau! !!”,—to provide
for its own survival. People become economic
individuals that depend for their survival on
commodities that are produced for them. Fun-
damentally, most citizens’ movements repre-
sent a rebellion against this environmentally
induced redefinition of people as consumers.

Minna-san, you wanted to hear me speak on
electronics, not grassland and roads. But I am
a historian; I wanted to speak first about the
pastoral commons as I know them from the
past in order then to say something about the
present, much wider threat to the commons by
electronics.

This man who speaks to you was born fifty-
five years ago in Vienna. One month after his
birth he was put on a train, and then ona ship
and brought to the Island of Brac. Here, ina
village on the Dalmatian coast, his grandfather
wanted to bless him. My grandfather lived in
the house in which his family had lived since
the time when Muromachi ruled in Kyoto.
Since then on the Dalmatian coast many rulers
had come and gone—the doges of Venice, the
sultans of Istanbul, the corsairs of Almissa,
the emperors of Austria, and the kings of Yu-
goslavia. But these many changes in the uni-
form and language of the governors had
changed little in daily life during these five
hundred years. The very same olive-wood raf-
ters still supported the roof of my grandfath-
er’s house. Water was still gathered from the
same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was
pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from
the same kind of boat, and the oil came from
trees planted when Edo was in its youth.

My grandfather had received news twice a
month. The news now arrived by steamer in
three days; and formerly, by sloop, it had taken
five days to arrive. When I was born, for the
people who lived off the main routes, history
still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the
environment was still in the commons. Peo-
ple lived in houses they had built; moved on
streets that had been trampled by the feet of
their animals; were autonomous in the pro-
curement and disposal of their water; could de-

296

pend on their own voices when they wanted to
speak up. All this changed with my arrival in
Brac.

On the same boat on which I arrived in
1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the
island. Few people there had ever heard of such
a thing. Up to that day, all men and women
had spoken with more or less equally powerful
voices. Henceforth this would change. Hence-
forth the access to the microphone would de-
termine whose voice shall be magnified. Si-
lence now ceased to be in the commons; it
became a resource for which loudspeakers com-
pete. Language itself was transformed thereby
from a local commons into a national resource
for communication. As enclosure by the lords
increased national productivity by denying the
individual peasant the right to keep a few
sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker
has destroyed that silence which so far had
given each man and woman his or her proper
and equal voice. Unless you have access to a
loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

I hope that the parallel now becomes clear.
Just as the commons of space are vulnerable,
and can be destroyed by the motorization of
traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnera-
ble, and can easily be destroyed by the en-
croachment of modern means of commu-
nication.

The issue which I propose for discussion
should therefore be clear: how to counter the
encroachment of new, electronic devices and
systems upon commons that are more subtle
and more intimate to our being than either
grassland or roads—commons that are at least
as valuable as silence. Silence, according to
western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary
for the emergence of persons. It is taken from
us by machines that ape people. We could eas-
ily be made increasingly dependent on ma-
chines for speaking and for thinking, as we are
already dependent on machines for moving.

Such a transformation of the environment
from a commons to a productive resource con-
stitutes the most fundamental form of environ-
mental degradation. This degradation has a
long history, which coincides with the history

Silence Is a Commons

of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced
to it. Unfortunately the importance of this
transformation has been overlooked or belittled
by political ecology so far. It needs to-be recog-
nized if we are to organize defense movements
of what remains of the commons. This defense
constitutes the crucial public task for political
action during the eighties. The task must be
undertaken urgently because commons can ex-

ist without police, but resources cannot. Just
as traffic does, computers call for police, and
for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle
forms.

By definition, resources call for defense by
police. Once they are defended, their recovery
as commons becomes increasingly difficult.
This is a special reason for urgency.

297

KATYSBUREER

Events Are
the Teacher

In the Winter 1983 issue this piece
ran immediately after one called
“The Secret Life of Swami Muktanan-
da,” by William Rodarmotr. It
chronicled the decline of the found-
ing guru of the Siddha meditation
movement, with thirty-one ashrams
around the world. In his final years,
in the late 70s and early 80s, Muk-
tananda had sex with young female
followers, misappropriated major
funds, and threatened and autho-
rized beatings of departing malcon-
tents by his bodyguards, Rodarmor
reported. The charges, abundantly
testified to, were stonewall-denied
by Muktananda’s surviving follow-
ers. And so this article on the San
Francisco Zen Center stood out in
contrast.

There were three things I hoped
for in running the article. I hoped it
would not undo my decades-long
friendship with Dick Baker; total
failure on that score. Dick doesn’t
talk to me now. I hoped it might be
of some use to Zen Center in refind-
ing its balance. That one’s hard to
assess. Many people in the commu-

298

nity critiqued Katy Butler’s article
through a sequence of drafts, till it
became almost an official document,
though still intensely her own. Some
were deeply unhappy with its exis-
tence and its content; some felt relief
that a compassionate, fairly detailed
account was what finally went out to
the world.

Events since Fall 83. On Decem-
ber 20, 1983, after months of tur-
moil, Baker resigned as abbot of Zen
Center, and the Board of Directors
accepted his resignation. A dozen or
so students followed Baker to two
new Buddhist practice centers he
founded and funded in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, and on Potrero Hill in
San Francisco. Many senior students
left Zen Center, some continuing
their Zen practice, some not. Katy
Butler still works at the San Francisco
Chronicle, and in her home she still
sits zazen in the early mornings. Zen
Center itself reorganized around a
wider distribution of responsibility.
Each piece of the whole has greater
autonomy—the practice centers in
San Francisco, Tassajara, Green
Gulch Farm, the businesses like
Greens restaurant, Green Gulch
Grocer, etc. Finances were brought
under control—the fundamental fi-
nancial legacy of the Baker-roshi
years is a sound, even spectacular,
one, which he can well be proud of.
Zen Center is taking its time finding
a new abbot; the current part-time
teacher possibly becoming full-time
is Katagiri-roshi, of the Minneapolis

Events Are the Teacher

Zen Center. A long, careful healing
with strength where the scars are is
well along.

The third thing I hoped for, and
the entire reason for running the
piece, was that other religious com-
munities might be shocked to aware-
ness and might find a handle on their
own problems. That seems to have
happened. Voluminous mail con-
firmed that Zen Center’s situation
was the opposite of unique. Prob-
lems of sex, money, control, runa-
way charisma, and denial were found
in the leadership (and hence the fol-
lowership, since they make each
other) of probably the majority of
new religious groups in America.
Not all, but most. Some undertook
the labor of reform. One Buddhist
group confronted their teacher’s al-
coholism, and he dutifully joined
Alcoholics Anonymous. Some set
about freeing the teacher from total
administrative control. Some simply
employed, even encouraged, a new
wariness in the students. And some
insisted There’s No Problem Here.
They'll be sorry.

Stewart Brand

Do not believe in anything simply because you have
heard it.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been
handed down for many generations.

Do not believe in anything because it 1s spoken and
rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found
written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of

your teachers and elders.

But after observation and analysis, when you find
that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive
to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it
and live up to tt.

This plea for common sense has been handed
down as the words of the Buddha, a man born
in 560 B.C. in India, who studied with many
teachers before finding his own way, through
meditation, to enlightenment.

Last April 8 {1983}, the day commemorated
as Buddha’s birthday, Zentatsu Baker-roshi,
dharma heir of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and a
line of teachers tracing back to Buddha, was at
Tassajara monastery near Big Sur, leading the
intense meditation period called sesshin. At the
same time, the sixteen members of the Board
of Directors of Baker-roshi’s San Francisco Zen
Center were sitting on chairs in a circle inside
the center’s Victorian guest house in the city.
Three senior priests (a woman and two men)
told the group that Baker-roshi had recently
become sexually involved with a woman stu-
dent. Her husband, whom Baker-roshi had de-
scribed as his best friend, was extremely upset.

Each Board member then spoke slowly and
carefully in turns around the circle. All came
to know what some had known for years, and
others had suspected. There had been at least
two other affairs with women students, both of
them damaging to the efforts of those women
to practice Zen. For Blanche Hartman, a fifty-
eight-year-old former chemist and statistician
who had been ordained a priest by Baker-roshi,
“The meeting was devastating. A sinking feel-
ing in my stomach, like, I knew it was com-
ing, and here it is. My life is smashed. Our life
together is smashed. Something very precious
in me is destroyed. At that point, I couldn’t
see how we could continue.” It was a moment
that changed Zen Center, I believe forever.

Yvonne Rand, another priest who was first
introduced to Zen Center by Richard Baker,
said of the meeting, “It seemed very clear that
this was an event that was out of whack. For
myself, my sense was that there was a real shift
in authority which I don’t know how to de-
scribe in any other way but moral authority.”

The board met again the following day. The
senior teaching priests, Lew Richmond and
Reb Anderson, had met with Baker-roshi and
brought back the news that he did not appear
to understand how seriously the Board felt

Katy Butler

about the matter. At this meeting, Blanche
Hartman began to understand that something
had changed on the Board, which in the past
had almost always acquiesced to Baker-roshi’s
wishes. This time, nobody tried to explain
away his actions. Nobody tried to ostracize
those who were critical of him, as had hap-
pened so often through the previous twelve
years.

Remembers Blanche, “I began having a
sense of the commitment of the group, the un-
animity of concern and care. It reassured me
that this time, there wasn’t going to be any
sweeping under the rug. We were going to face
it together, and I wasn’t going to have to leave
{Zen Center}.”

Baker-roshi appeared at the next Board
meeting, the following day, by invitation. He
walked into the room where the priests and
students sat on chairs in a circle, wearing their
black robes. He knelt on the floor in sezza, a

strong, formal zazen position, and began to ex-
plain. Yvonne Rand, who was chairing the
meeting, asked him to sit in a chair like the
rest of them, and to listen to what the Board
had to say. At first, he remained in seiza and
continued to try to explain. Yvonne asked
again that he sit at their level. And again.
Baker-roshi rose and sat on a chair.

Many Board members later felt that the
meeting had come to an impasse. Baker-roshi
was “obviously distraught,” remembered Ed
Brown, the author of the Tassajara Bread Book
and comanager of Greens, the highly regarded
vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco run by
Zen Center.

Brown came away from the meeting with
the feeling that their words had not really
penetrated.

One by one, board members spoke to Baker-
roshi, the man who had been their teacher for

CGASRAAS

Baker-roshi at sesshin lecture, Tassajara Mountain Center, 1975.

300

puouyry sina]

Events Are the Teacher

twelve years, for whom many felt great grati-
tude. They have since told me that they spoke
of their own collusion in allowing him to be-
come so removed from feedback. Said Blanche
Hartman, “It was something we had done to-
gether; something we had to straighten out to-
gether. In the middle of a lot of anger, we
knew it had to be done with a sense of right
speech.”

Blanche, and others, apologized to this man
who had spent so many years trying to practice
Zen and to lead this relatively young Buddhist
community. “I told him I thought it had been
doing him no service to say nothing about my
suspicions. It was a mistake to protect him
from the consequences of his own consequen-
tial actions,” she said.

Another Board member said to Baker-roshi,
“Listen. Please just listen.”

Said Yvonne, with great passion, “I want
you to stop.”

So, last spring, we became the first new Amer-
ican religious community to effectively tell its
leader to stop. It has been painful, but I think

_ that the way the people of Zen Center have
_ faced this crisis could be an encouragement to
_ other religious communities facing similar

problems.

A process began which IJ and other Zen stu-
dents are still living through. There has been
shock, love, pain, grief, and anger. Some stu-
dents have left. Others have likened their feel-
ings to going through a divorce after a long
marriage.

There has been intense self-questioning, as
people try to unravel the role they played in ef-
fectively isolating Baker-roshi from meaning-
ful feedback. The community has seized this
crisis as an opportunity to recreate itself, and
to change so that in the future its leaders may
be less isolated from students. Nobody yet
knows how it will all come out, or exactly how
it happened.

After the first series of meetings, the Board
members met in small groups with students,
telling them what had been discovered and al-
lowing them to express their emotions about
it. Most students took the news of Baker-

roshi’s sexual involvements very seriously —
something that has puzzled people who point
out that we are not a celibate community, and
that such relationships take two people.

But within the context of a religious com-
munity, the news was shocking. Baker-roshi,
who is married, had not followed the code he
had clearly described to Zen students who were
having affairs: no deceit, no manipulation, and
no harming of anyone else’s spiritual path.
Leaders, he had often said, were expected to set
an example judged by tougher standards.

Hearing about the affairs was especially con-
fusing to some priests because Baker-roshi had
discussed such situations at a monks’ meeting
some months before the crisis. Baker-roshi had
referred to another Zen teacher with a reputa-
tion for sexual relationships with students. He
expressed his disapproval, saying that the
teachers’ board of directors should have
strongly confronted the situation.

As a woman student, I felt particularly
threatened. I felt burnt, as though my tongue
had been singed with boiling tea. When I first
approached the man whom I hoped would be-
come my teacher in the deepest sense, I hoped
to establish a relationship of trust. I wanted to
reveal myself, to drop the games I used to sur-
vive in the “outside” world. I hoped he would
help me continue to practice zazen (medita-
tion) through times of self-doubt, frustration,
and fear.

Given my own hopes, I see why some
women might be very vulnerable to sexual ad-
vances from a religious teacher. It must be hard
on these men: another woman student has told
me she watched women flirt with Baker-roshi
for years. “Of course there are sexual feelings,”
she said of her own close teaching relationship
with Baker-roshi. “I was aware of it and work-
ing with it. I learned how not to take these
feelings and run with them.”

Although Baker-roshi gave me much help-
ful advice in the two years I was his student,
we did not succeed in building a deep, trusting
relationship. Hearing about the affairs has
made me wary about trying again.

After the Board members told students
about the situation, they asked Baker-roshi not

301

Katy Butler

to lead services or give lectures, and he agreed.
He was also asked not to perform the undo,
the silent morning walk during the first period
of zazen, when each student responds with
raised, palm-pressed hands. Some students be-
gan to refer to him as Richard Baker instead of
roshi (teacher); others did not know what to
call him.

Students began to talk to each other ina
more open way, and all the other resentments
about Baker-roshi boiled up as though a lid
had been removed from a pot.

Uneasiness had been growing, especially
during the last three years. He had traveled to
Russia on a mission of world peace, but he had
been seeing students increasingly rarely. He
was almost never in the zendo. He seemed to be
involved in a whirl of meetings, trips, tele-
phone calls, and shopping, unable to rest on
the ground. Decisions, it became clear, were
made by him, and community meetings and
the Board of Directors had little weight.
While students worked for minimum wage at
Zen Center businesses, he spent more than two
hundred thousand dollars a year. Many of these
expenditures related to his role as abbot; for in-
stance, his office expenses and trips. But while
students at Green Gulch Farm, Zen Center’s
Marin County practice center and working
farm, lived in trailers and showered outside, he
spent money impulsively on art, furniture, and
expensive restaurant meals. One year Zen Cen-
ter paid four thousand dollars for his member-
ship in New York’s Adirondack Club.

The contrast between the abbot’s and the
students’ lives was symbolized for many by his
car. About three years ago, he had asked the
Board if he could buy a very expensive BMW.
The Board had voiced widespread uneasiness,
but when Baker-roshi asked the treasurer to go
to the bank with him and sign the papers, he
had done so.

Now, suddenly, the emperor had no clothes.
At the end of April, after numerous discus-
sions with Baker-roshi, the Board reported
that he had “requested” a leave of absence for
an indefinite period, to be reviewed in a year.
Baker-roshi, the statement said, would con-
tinue to ‘‘live, practice, and work with us.”

302

They quoted him as saying, “I want to under-
stand this matter to its depths but I don’t
know how to do that. The best answer I have to
this question now is to immerse myself in the
practice of the Sangha [community] for I know
Suzuki-roshi is there.”

Over the next six months, Richard Baker’s
expense accounts were stopped, and he and his
family were limited to a stipend of approxi-
mately twenty-five hundred dollars a month,
plus the use of his two Zen Center houses. His
three anjas (attendants) and three administra-
tive assistants were given other jobs, and their
offices turned into temporary dormitory
rooms. The notorious white BMW was ga-
raged, and the Board announced plans to sell
the vehicle, which is extremely expensive to
maintain.

Richard Baker told people he wanted to
walk alone from Zen Center to Tassajara, the
Center’s monastery near Carmel Valley, a dis-
tance of 175 miles. The trip was interrupted
by visits to friends’ houses, a weekend in Palm
Springs with his wife Virginia, and detours to
New York. Once at Tassajara, he worked for
several days side by side with students. Then
he left for Europe, where he appeared at a con-
ference, and then went to the south of France
to spend time with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Viet-
namese monk for whom he has great respect.
He has mostly been absent from Zen Center,
and has not met publicly with students since
the crisis.

In his absence, Zen Center began to experi-
ment with new ways of doing things. Meet-
ings at the city center, which in the past had
been extremely subdued, erupted with new
frankness. At one meeting, a priest said he had
never before felt free to speak his mind.

A volunteer committee of students brought
in consultants and psychologists. Recognizing
the lack of “horizontal” communication be-
tween ordinary students, they led small groups
and workshops in communication skills. I be-
gan to feel free to express parts of myself which
I had previously tried to leave at the door of
Zen Center, and to talk in my own language.
Other students underwent similar trans-
formations.

Events Are the Teacher

One student, Betsy Sawyer, told me she has
returned to her first questions about Zen. prac-
tice, and has begun to examine her own need
for psychological growth as well. “This big
boo-boo has liberated me,” she said.

“The students woke up,” said Lew Rich-
mond, the head of religious practice at Green
Gulch Farm. “Something had been lifted, and
they were who they were—and that’s the way
Buddhism is supposed to be.”’

The Board of Directors, which had been al-
most dormant for several years, began to meet
every week and take on the running of Zen
Center. Its meetings were opened to small
groups of students, and its minutes made
available. In a community where information
had previously been tightly guarded, it was a
radical change.

“Affinity groups” of eight to ten students
and an overseeing “‘spokescouncil” were formed
to discuss Zen Center’s direction. There is now
a new mood of shared decision-making, as
people struggle to create a healthy community
for the study of a profound teaching.

The problems Zen Center began to face last
spring are not new. Abuses of power, money,
and sex occur within the Catholic Church, po-
litical parties, and corporations—as well as
within the non-Western religious movements.
Buddhism, for all its intellectual elaboration
and long tradition, is not immune. It was
brought to the West by pioneering individual
teachers, most of them far removed from those
who taught them. In America, teachers are too
far apart—both in style and in geographical
location—to supervise each other as an effec-
tive community of peers.

In New York, the community of Eido-roshi
has been repeatedly split by accusations, which
he has denied, of sexual relations with stu-
dents. Elsewhere, another Buddhist teacher
with a serious drinking problem openly and
cheerfully sleeps with women students. Some
Buddhist leaders are terrible administrators,
some experiment with drugs, some are homo-
sexual, and some think homosexuality is
wrong. I believe that as our communities ma-
ture, we will learn to treat these talented

teachers with a realistic American kind of re-
spect they need. We have been driving them
crazy by accepting everything they do as an
expression of religious teaching. Living with-
out feedback in a community of emotionally
dependent people is something like living ina
sensory deprivation tank. It distorts the per-
ceptions and isolates the leader.

I think that something like this happened
slowly and gradually at Zen Center as it grew. I
believe that Zen Center had developed weak-
nesses as a Community that made it hard to
stay in touch with common sense, self-asser-
tion, and trust in one another.

In November of 1971, Richard Baker, a former
Harvard student and organizer of conferences
for the University of California’s extension pro-
gram, put on blue and brown robes. In what is
called the Mountain Seat Ceremony, his dying
teacher, Suzuki-roshi, made him abbot of Zen
Center, entrusting to him his gentle brand of
Japanese Soto Zen.

Dick Baker was not then, and is not now,
your typical monk: Maine-born, energetic,
bright, talkative, hungry for new experiences
and ideas, headstrong, and epicurean, he faced
at thirty-five the difficult job of following a be-
loved Japanese teacher who had died too soon.
I was not there, but the image I get of the
community that watched this ceremony is that
it was stripped down, oriented more toward
zazen practice, with Suzuki-roshi’s example of
its effectiveness before it.

When Suzuki-roshi died two weeks later,
Zen Center was little more than a place to sit
zazen; there was the city center in the heart of
the slums, and Tassajara monastery in a deep
canyon near Carmel Valley. As Baker-roshi as-
sumed leadership, Zen Center changed in
many positive ways. He worked with other
students translating chants from Japanese to
English; he encouraged single women and fam-
ilies with children to try monastic practice at
Tassajara. He engineered the acquisition of
Green Gulch Farm, supported Buddhist schol-
ars, and managed to be a helpful Buddhist
teacher, especially at Tassajara, or in sesshin.
He had a genius for entrepreneurship and a vi-

OD

Katy Butler

sion of a vigorous, self-supporting Buddhist
community. But over the next twelve years,
something happened. One older student told
me that while Baker-roshi knew how to give
help, he did not know how to take it. He knew
how to nuture people who felt weak, but he
had a harder time encouraging them to be
strong.

Marc Alexander, Zen Center’s current presi-
dent, described it as the “frog in hot water
syndrome’: put a frog in boiling water, and
he’ll jump out. Put a frog in cold water and
slowly heat it and he’ll stay and boil to death.

Said Alexander, ‘““The businesses began after
students began coming back from Tassajara
wanting to have some continuation of working
throughout the day with other people doing
the same Buddhist practices—mindfulness,
compassion, right livelihood. Supporting our-
selves was the secondary reason. But little by
little, supporting ourselves became the
stronger motivating factor. Baker-roshi was
creating all these things while we didn’t have
the staff to take care of them fully. Asa result,
it became less interesting to work there.”

From places devoted to “work practice” that
were incidentally businesses, they became
Buddhist-flavored businesses. It’s a sad irony
that over the years many of them became more
successful to their patrons than to the people
who worked in them. They are places where
you can sit still. The Buddhist qualities of
wholehearted attention, of a calm noninterfer-
ing kindness, permeated them. They are beau-
tiful spaces, their clean Japanese aesthetic
spiced with luxury. Every time my family
comes to San Francisco, we have a ritual dinner
at Greens, and things get said that haven’t
been said elsewhere. But students who worked
in the kitchen began to complain that the fre-
netic restaurant work had gone beyond any
conception of Buddhist practice, and the hours
made it difficult to get to zazen.

John Bailes remembers working at Green
Gulch Farm, which is an oasis of quiet for in-
terested non-Buddhists who visit for Sunday
lectures. “I’d be down in the fields struggling
with the carthorses, sweating and not too
happy, and Baker-roshi would arrive in his

304

golden robes with a group of dazzled Marin-
ites. They’d ask me, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be
living here?’ There was a great gap that I
would describe as feudalistic. I was enraged. It
was coming out of my pores. But there was
some kind of tension against speaking out.”

As the businesses needed more workers, a
confusion developed between serving the needs
of the institution and serving Buddhism.
Being serious became equated with one’s will-
ingness to work within a business or live ina
residence. When I told Baker-roshi I was seri-
ous about studying Zen, he jokingly suggested
that I quit my job, move into the building,
and start working at Greens. Doing what I
did—working outside Zen Center—was sub-
tly denigrated, and what might be called “‘lay
practice” was not sufficiently respected for its
ability to contribute another perspective and
some form of reality check.

While students worked long hours in the
bakery, the restaurant, or the fields, they tried
to live as though they were in a monastery. Za-
zen began at 4:30 in the morning, and stu-
dents often nodded off in lectures. The monas-
tic style of life that worked so well for a
limited period of training at Tassajara—hier-
archy, no discussion, and little sleep—was ex-
hausting for families, city dwellers, and
farmworkers.

I still do not understand exactly why people
had such difficulty talking openly about their
reservations, but I can describe my own experi-
ence. I came to sitting by accident. I was visit-
ing Tassajara on a summer Camping trip six
years ago when I met an old friend, a student
there, who invited me to sit. I remember
walking out of the stone zendo at six A.M. into
a clear morning light. I had time, and I had
space in a way I had not experienced before.

Another summer I spent six weeks following
the schedule of work and meditation at Tassa-
jara, and began to feel there might be a place
where I could allow my deepest, least-articu-
lated motivations to come forward. Making
beds with other Zen students, I did not have to
prove I was the best; I could just try to be
wholehearted about whatever I was doing. Ris-
ing at 4:30, sitting zazen, eating and working

Events Are the Teacher

with long periods of silence, I did not have to
manufacture an interesting “personality” in or-
der to make conversation with people. I had
been a union organizer and an investigative re-
porter. I knew how to assert myself and make
trouble. But I was tired of it. I had felt starved
for most of my life for a way to question and
express my deepest self. I wasn’t about to
throw it away to raise questions about a
crummy twenty-six-thousand-dollar BMW.
And yet my common-sense questions kept ris-
ing. Like many other students, I thought I was
the only one that had them.

Two summers ago, | sat sesshin at Green
Gulch Farm. We were visited by a respected
Japanese teacher, and the day he left we lined
the driveway at Baker-roshi’s request to say
good-bye to him. Sesshin has a way of produc-
ing an intensity of awareness. I clearly remem-
ber standing in my black robes with some sixty
others that gentle summer day. One of Baker-
roshi’s assistants drove the white BMW up.
Another cleaned the windshield and the trunk.
A woman stood at the side with a basket of
flowers. Baker-roshi, his visitor, and other
guests got into the car. As Baker-roshi’s assis-
tant loaded in the luggage and prepared to
drive the entourage to the airport, we all
bowed repeatedly, and I thought, witha smile,
this is being ina cult.

I don’t think Zen Center is a cult, of course,
and I think the way this crisis has been handled
proves it. But the day I stood there in front of
that car, I was doing something I didn’t under-
stand, taking ona piece of Japanese behavior,
simply because I had been asked to. I didn’t
tell anyone I felt that way.

Despite growing unhappiness and increas-
ing resistance to Baker-roshi’s expansion plans,
the community could not effectively tell him
to stop. Among the senior students, who
might have said stop, the atmosphere was like
a medieval palace, one said. The courtiers
strove to outdo each other for approval of their
insight. Said one senior monk, “Then, when it
comes time to confront Baker-roshi, you don’t
feel like the person you are competing with
will support you.”

Other senior students were not caught in

this web of competition, but felt too dazzled to
challenge him. He seemed so articulate and
worldly to these men and women who had be-
come monks in their early twenties. And so
many of the projects for which he argued so
convincingly had worked so well.

When a friend of Blanche Hartman’s hinted
that Baker-roshi had been involved in affairs
she said, a little too quickly, ‘“That’s hearsay.”
Now she says she thinks she was saying,
“Please don’t tell me. I don’t know what I’d
do. I might have to leave, and I’m fifty-eight
years old; my whole life is here.”

Among newer students like myself, a confu-
sion about certain Buddhist ideas contributed
to people’s inability to trust their own common
sense or speak out about their doubts. The first
of these ideas is the concept of Dharma (teach-
ing) transmission. Most simply put, as I un-
derstand it, the goal of each Buddhist teacher
and student is to gain or allow access to the
student’s enlightened mind through medita-
tion and practice together. The ceremony of
transmission acknowledges that the student
has found access to this clear, big mind, which
all of us have the potential to find, which is the
same as the teacher’s mind, and ultimately,
Buddha’s.

It is a tricky concept. We speak of a Zen
“lineage,” or dharma “heirs,” as though the es-
sence of Buddhist teaching had been handed
down through the generations like a patri-
mony. The language can lead us to think that
the teacher who is a dharma “heir” possesses
something as physical as the brown robe and
bowl that symbolize it.

At Zen Center, the idea of dharma transmis-
sion became a way of keeping Suzuki-roshi
alive. Richard Baker was conceived of as a frag-
ile vessel that contained Suzuki-roshi’s pure
mind. Many senior monks told me they felt
powerless to disgrace or stop Baker-roshi until
he transmitted Tenshin Reb Anderson, so that
Suzuki-roshi’s lineage would survive. Thus,
the concept of transmission began to tyran-
nize. In 1972, when the Board of Directors re-
sisted the purchase of Green Gulch Farm,
Baker-roshi threatened to leave if it wasn’t
bought. The Board then acquiesced. “He used

305

Katy Butler

the authority of dharma transmission to
frighten us. He said, ‘I’m going to take my
baseball bat and go home, and you guys won't
be able to play Buddhism any more,’ remem-
bered one senior monk.

The conception of dharma transmission is
intertwined with a popular image of a per-
fectly enlightened human being whose every
gesture is a teaching—an image that makes it
hard to question a teacher’s actions even when
one’s common sense cries out for an
explanation.

“The idea is out of context here,” said Lew
Richmond, the head of religious practice at
Green Gulch Farm. “In the Orient, every craft
has transmission from master to disciple. Its
purpose is to protect against unauthorized and
self-appointed teachers. But this aggrandize-
ment of transmission in the minds of young
meditators has not served our interest. What
are you authenticating? Every word and deed
for the rest of your life? We have an idealized
image of an enlightened person. It’s not,
strictly speaking, accurate to speak of an en-
lightened person, but rather of enlightened
activity.”

This is not a simple issue. Some trust ts cru-
cial. Reb Anderson likes to tell the story of
helping Suzuki-roshi build his rock garden at
Tassajara. Suzuki-roshi would ask Reb to lever
a huge boulder into one position. Then to an-
other position. Then back to the original posi-
tion. When Reb protested and asked if they
couldn’t think it through first and then move
rocks, Suzuki-roshi told him to shut up. Fi-
nally, Reb simply let himself go wholeheart-
edly into moving the rock and not thinking
ahead.

From the outside, this could look like an ec-
centric old man forcing a student to meaning-
lessly move rocks around. For Reb, from the
inside, it was a way of learning. There’s no
easy litmus test for when a teacher’s actions
tend toward liberation, and when they’re self-
ish. Your own common sense, how your body
feels, and the actions’ results can help guide
you. There are no teaching stories about teach-
ers enriching themselves at students’ expense

306

or sleeping with their students. But how are
you to know when your resistance is an expres-
sion of common sense, and when it’s the pride
of your small mind balking at moving rocks
around all day in the sun? Part of Zen practice
consists of trust, some willingness to try some-
thing out, not to be too sure of yourself.

Another confused notion of Zen teachings
played a role in creating a community where
plain talk was often discouraged. Zen warns
against too much dependence on written
teachings. Many of its teaching stories don’t
make rational or linguistic sense—in fact
they’re designed not to. At Zen Center, some
students seemed to interpret this to mean that
there was something wrong with speaking in
simple English sentences during our student
meetings. We were encouraged to practice
living without saying, “This is good, this is
bad,” or “I like this, I don’t like this.”’ The
older the student, the less was said, and this si-
lence was mistaken for wisdom. In our weekly
meetings, people, including me, were afraid of
looking like fools, of revealing that they did
not dwell constantly in their widest minds.

We sat straight-backed and still in the
zendo, breathing deeply, inevitably releasing
unconscious material. Outside the zendo, we
tried to follow practices of right conduct, right
thought, and right speech. But it appeared
that for fear of harming others, some of us
were afraid to express anything at all. It was a
pressure cooker. I don’t think that the struc-
ture of Japanese Zen provided a way for Amer-
icans to work with the unconscious material re-
leased in zazen, to release or express it in a way
that would not harm others. People also subtly
withdrew within a community which had no
nonjudgmental way of sharing unacceptable
thoughts and feelings.

Suzuki-roshi often described Zen as similar
to putting a snake into a bamboo tube as a way
of showing it its nature. How to stand, bow,
and sit in the zendo is carefully prescribed, and
very powerful when seventy people do it to-
gether. When I first came, I discovered what a
relief it can be not to mechanically smile, but
to bow instead. Outside the zendo, after the

Events Are the Teacher

bow, I didn’t always know what to say. The
Japanese forms became a way of avoiding con-
tact. This coldness, awkwardness, and this
lack of peer contact, contributed to a flow of
energy and emotion upward into the hierarchy.
Each person thought they stood alone.

Much of this has been stood on its head
since the April crisis. As mentioned earlier, a
committee of students brought in consultants
to teach us to talk to each other, and we have
formed affinity groups that meet twice a
month to discuss the future direction of Zen
Center. The formal structure of the organiza-
tion is still hierarchical—legal power rests
with Baker-roshi and the Board, unless they
fail to agree. Then the students would break
the tie.

Most of the affinity groups have recently
told the Board that they want to resolve our re-
lationship with Baker-roshi, one way or an-
other. Some students do not want him to be
their teacher again. Other would like him to
return, but not on the same terms. There
seems to be widespread agreement over the
need to separate “church” (practice) from
“state” (administration), so that students don’t
feel their spiritual understanding is on the line
when they question an administrative decision.
The affinity groups are encouraging feedback
from the “bottom’’—if not outright
democracy.

Some students are leaving; some feel bitter
that their trust and Buddhist teaching have
been abused. One student said, “If he could
give up all attachment to being a teacher, the
student could begin to trust him. As long as he
seems to need being a teacher, they don’t trust
him. They’re expecting him to transform him-
self without safety. You can’t learn a whole
new way to be, under attack. People are say-
ing, ‘transform,’ and yet they’re still angry.”

Students, and a visiting Zen teacher, have
suggested that Richard Baker try working side
by side with students, or studying with an-
other teacher, or counseling, as a way of com-
pleting his Zen training. How he will respond
to such ideas still remains to be seen. Some
students say they will never think of him as a

Baker-roshi at Green Gulch Farm.

Buddhist teacher again, and hope that he will
resign. Among some of them, there has been

a kind of satanization of Richard Baker, as
though all of Zen Center’s ills can be laid at his
feet. To them, he’s too powerful, too manipu-
lative to be safely reined in by ordinary people.
It is the flip side of the delusion of the per-
fectly enlightened person. There are others,
like poet Philip Whalen and businessman John
Nelson, who would like to see Richard Baker
return as Baker-roshi, the same as before.

“It worked for me,” said Nelson, who came
to Zen Center shortly after graduating from
Yale, and found a way to spend time at Tassa-
jara with his wife and children as monastic stu-
dents, and also build a career. “When he lec-
tured, I was inspired. He never really followed
the schedule, but he made everybody else fol-
low it. When I bowed to him fully, I felt I was
bowing to our heritage. He represented in his
person the legacy of our teachers. He was al-
ways helpful to me, even when he was hard on

5 o7

1?d PVA

Katy Butler

me. I knew he was driving a fancy car and all
that, but I feel tremendous gratitude. I see my
teacher in trouble and I say, ‘Wait, let’s take
better care of this.’ I’m willing to let him
spend a lot of money. What am I supposed to
say? Fine, please go off him?”

We tried to swallow whole the Japanese form
of Zen—or at least, our naive understanding
of it. Now we're in the process of chewing it
up, digesting it, making it into an American
Zen. For a long time, most of us accepted,
without thinking it through, foreign concep-
tions of hierarchy, of information restricted on
a “need to know” basis. Coming from a culture
almost devoid of ways of showing respect,
some of us hungrily took on another way.
Now, those foreign ideas are being tested for
their usefulness against the values that are the
genius of Western culture: democracy, open
information, a free press, psychological devel-
opment, the separation of Church and State,
and systems of checks and balances.

As I write this in early November, it is unclear
exactly how Zen Center’s members will resolve
their relationship with Baker-roshi, and what
form the community will take in the future.
The process is still evolving, and for all the
self-questioning by Zen students, I don’t think
anyone fully understands exactly how people
stopped taking the risks of speaking out.

One senior student has written of ‘our con-
fusion about how to work with a teacher, our
not knowing how to question and trust him si-
multaneously, our isolation of him and of our-
selves, our abdication of our own perspective

. . Our impoverishment with our own cul-
tural inheritance, our emotional immaturity,
our readiness to imitate forms not fully
understood.”

“Our coming to rest in zazen expressed for
many of us a great need to deepen our lives and
find satisfactions deeper than our culture of-
fers,” the student wrote. “The fact that this
small group of Americans does not yet under-

308

stand how to take this brilliant, simple, im-
possible practice and create a social form
around it that supports the individual and the
community is the deepest teaching for all of
us, and I would hope, the deeper teaching of
this event in American religious life.”

A TRULY WICKED ROSHI

We have just read ‘Events are the Teacher” by
Katy Butler. We read this with awe, trying to
imagine all those flourishing industries, all
that money flowing in, all those students, and
all this in the Paris of the West. We drooled
and our fantasies went wild. What we
wouldn’t give to trade Roshis.

Our Zen center is in one of the smog city’s
worst ghettos. Every time we start a business
to earn enough money to get out, our Roshi
shuts it down. We tried raising vegetables ina
window box and he turned off the water. We
opened a diner and our Roshi called the health
department and finished us off. We started a
publication and our Roshi sued us for publish-
ing him. We bought him a secondhand Datsun
and it was stolen and wrecked. Our priceless
bells and statue were stolen twice. There are
too few students, so scholarships are offered
strangers off the street to fill the zendo. Our
Roshi prefers beginners anyway . . . he says
it’s much better than TV. Reflecting on the
San Francisco Zen Center controversy, we were
even more in awe. . . could there really bea
Zen Center with only ove controversy in ten
years? Our Roshi specializes in continuous
multiple crises with palace intrigue. Upon fur-
ther reflection, maybe our Roshi is now the one
for Dick Baker to study under. . . ?

Seiko Long

Joshin Bigelow

Shuko Green

La Jolla, California

{Spring 1984}

P.S. The women students are sad to report that
our Roshi has never once tried to romance any

of them.

PAUL HAWKEN
Surviving in
Small Business

Random Notes from a
Small Business Junkie

Paul Hawken became our most pop-
ular writer almost overnight with
his first article in Summer 1980,
“What’s Economical?” Bantam
Books and the Senate Finance Com-
mittee called him with offers and
questions. With the next article,
“Disintermediation” in Spring
1981, the skeleton of a book was be-
coming apparent. Sure enough, The
Next Economy, based on a number of
CQ articles, came out from Holt,
Rinehart & Winston in 1983 (it’s
now in paperback from Ballantine).
The Spring 1984 article here, his last
before CQ became Whole Earth Re-
view, is in the process of becoming a
book, possibly also a TV series, pos-
sibly also a computer program, all
called “How to Grow a Business.”
Paul’s in his late thirties now.
That “first business when I was nine-
teen” was Erewhon, based in Boston,
a phenomenon of the times. His
subsequent foray into writing was

The Magic of Findhorn (Harper &

Row, 1975), which became a best-
seller. His present business, Smith &
Hawken in Mill Valley, California,
purveys the best garden tools from
all over the world via a much-loved
mail-order catalog. It’s much loved
because the level of service is so
high, because gardening itself is
loved, and because the tools speak to
an idea of excellence and a philoso-
phy of real economy through qual-
ity. The Hawken articles and the
Hawken tools have the same
message.

Since 1980, Paul has had a major
role in the survival of the small busi-
ness called Point Foundation.

Stewart Brand

I started my first business when I was nineteen.
It is difficult to say, even eighteen years later,
whether it was a success or not; it depends on
how you measure it. The business was a natural
food company, started in 1966—well before
there was such an industry. My business had
two big strikes against it: me, and the fact that
I didn’t have a clue as to what business I was
in. The problem with me was that I didn’t
know anything about business, and had a posi-
tive aversion to the entire business ethic as I
understood it. After all, it was the mid-sixties,
and the link between corporate avarice and
overseas adventurism was trumpeted every
night via television footage on Vietnam, Dow
Chemical, et al. Business seemed like a good
thing vot to do.

The second problem, not knowing what
business I was in, was even thornier. Usually
when you start a business, you know what it

309

Paul Hawken

will be. If it is a deli, you have visited and
eaten in dozens. You know what you like, what
you don’t, and what you would do differently.
In the case of the natural foods business, there
were no antecedents. The health food stores

in my neighborhood were staffed by women

in white uniforms and hosiery, looking like
nurses on night duty. They (the stores that is)
had strange odors and reminded me of quasi-
licit pharmacies. There was virtually nothing
natural in them. Everything was a concoction,
full of additives that were putatively better
than the ones in the supermarket. So, in that
sense, I knew what not to do. But it was small
help.

Nevertheless, it was the right business to be
in at the right time, and it grew from twenty-
five dollars per day in gross revenues to twenty-
five thousand dollars per day seven years later. I
have to confess, it wasn’t fun. It was only fun
in the beginning, when its size allowed me to
be in touch with my customers, suppliers, and
associates. When it reached the size that took
me away from the counter and put me behind
a desk, it got hard. It took me several years to
figure that out, and when I did, I left it.

During those years, the business made
money some years, lost it in others, hired 150
employees, bought railcars, opened stores on
both coasts, set up manufacturing, almost
went bankrupt, and engendered a lean and
hungry group of competitors. The first lesson
in small business is that you w7// be noticed if
you succeed or grow, and you will be ignored if
you fail. Former friends, hawk-eyed entrepre-
neurs, and marketing executives of corpora-
tions will all notice. And they will all try to
cream you. Sounds awful. But in fact it is
merely inevitable. I remember walking into
my store one afternoon and seeing four execu-
tives of a supermarket chain measure the store’s
square footage while tallying register totals on
a notepad. They were trying to figure out our
sales per square foot (which were phenomenally
high for the food industry). Hi guys. Kellogg’s
used one of our subsidiary names for an adver-
tising slogan to reposition its corn flakes in the
market. Pet Foods walked off with our logo-
type and package design without so much as a
tip of the cap.

310

After seven years, I left the country and took
up the pen. When I returned to America four-
teen months later, what I discovered was sober-
ing. I was unemployable. I had never been an
employee. I checked the want ads in the Sun-
day paper. I couldn’t find a job description that
matched my qualifications. After all, what was
I? I had sealed my fate at an early age, and not
wanting to go back to college to get a job de-
scription, I went back into business. Today,
after eighteen years of being in small business,
I have come to certain inescapable conclusions.
Be careful: They may be wrong. They have
worked for me, though. They are the distilla-
tion of my own experience, as well as the ob-
servations of many other small businesses with
which I have consulted.

Start at the beginnning. This is the most ob-
vious-sounding rule of all. I wouldn’t mention
it if I didn’t constantly see people do the oppo-
site. Usually, when people start a business,
they have an image. It may be of some other
company they have seen or worked in, or it
may be just a fantasy. Whatever it is, it is
probably an image of where they would like to
end up. So, don’t start where you want to end
up. If you haven’t had experience in starting a
business before, start small, very small, and
use your minuteness and obscurity as an oppor-
tunity to learn. This means low overhead, fru-
gal means, hands-on. I have seen many people
who associate a successful business with the
trappings: a carpet, computer, car, secretary.
In eighteen years of business, I have never had
a personal secretary. (Read Up the Organization
by Robert Townsend [NWEC p.306; $3.95
postpaid from Fawcett/Random House, 400
Hahn Road, Westminister, Maryland 21157]
for further elaboration on this point.) I’ve had
the rest, but not until the business was well es-
tablished. In other words, do the business di-
rectly with as few frills and trappings as possi-
ble. You will learn faster, have a better chance
of survival, and you won’t be fooled by sur-
rounding yourself with the affectations of
SUCCESS.

Entrepreneurs are risk-avoiders. This is not so ob-
vious. The commonplace attitude is that an

Surviving in Small Business

entrepreneur is a gung-ho, three-sheets-to-the-
wind risk-taker, willing to plunge ahead where
others squirm. I don’t read it that way. An en-
trepreneur is a risk-avoider. He or she usually
starts by seeing a situation from an entirely
different angle than someone else. They see a
market, a niche, an idea, a product that is un-
seen or discounted by others. Whether this is a
personal computer (Apple), a hub-and-spokes
air delivery system (Federal Express), or house-
wives’ needs for aerobic exercise (Jane Fonda),
to these people the need for the product or ser-
vice is obvious. There is no risk because they
are totally identified with the end result. They
are not studying the market, they are the mar-
ket. That’s a big difference. What an entrepre-
neur will then do is try to identify every possi-
ble risk and obstacle that could prevent him or
her from achieving that goal, and eliminate as
many as possible. Entrepreneurs only appear to
be daring and innovative.

Borrow a lot or none. Money is where risk is
most obvious. You and whoever else you have
persuaded to join you stand to lose if you fail.
If you decide to borrow, then do not borrow
piddling amounts. Borrow as much as you can.
Why? Because if you are leveraged to your
teeth, no one will mess with you. An anecdote:
At one point in my food business days, I had
amassed and drawn over one million dollars on
my line of credit from the bank. These were
ninety-day notes that customarily rolled over
as well as letters of credit to overseas suppliers.
The bank loans exceeded our net worth by a
factor of five. When Nixon put on wage and
price controls in 1971-72, interest rates soared
to the historic high of thirteen percent. Bank
examiners from the state audited our loan
package and discovered that with the high in-
terest rates, we no longer “qualified” for all
those loans. The bank was forced to call the
notes.

Disaster. As I began paying down the notes
as they came due (thirty thousand to fifty thou-
sand dollars per week), I couldn’t pay my bills.
I was going broke, payrolls were kited, and
suppliers were angry. The solution seems so
obvious in retrospect, but it took an agonizing
few weeks of tribulation before I cottoned on.

One Monday morning, I called the vice-presi-
dent of the bank and told him in my best Bos-
ton accent to stuff it. An extraordinary thing
happened. I, who had always obsequiously
minced into the bank with my hat in hand,
was invited to the executive dining room on
the forty-eighth floor of the Prudential Tower.
I saw Oriental art on the walls, maids scurry-
ing about, and asparagus and strawberries ac-
companying the scallops (although it was still
February). In other words, as soon as I became
a problem, I was treated with the kind of at-
tention that should have been accorded a good
customer. I became a good customer, in their
crossed eyes, when I became a bad one. In
short, there was nothing they could do—
which affirms the maxim of Fred Smith, the
chairman and founder of Federal Express: “The
worst that can happen if you borrow a lot is
that you have a second partner.”

The other side of that coin is to borrow
nothing. Finance your start-up with savings
and investments from friends that are equity
investments. In other words, start with no
debt and keep it that way. This is an entirely
different way to do things, and is suitable for
people with faint hearts, aversions to debt, or
simply those who do things the old-fashioned
way. (Having tried the former, I prefer the lat-
ter.) The discipline of using only paid-in capi-
tal is that you know exactly how long your
leash is. You have so much money, and you
tend to do everything possible to at least pre-
serve the amount of capital paid in.

If it’s a good idea, it’s probably too late. When you
have a new idea for a business, talk it up with
friends and associates. Notice carefully their
reaction. First, eliminate all responses from
persons who always say nice, positive things.
From those who are objective and will usually
speak their mind, notice the drift. If they say
“that’s a wonderful idea, John,” you are in big
trouble. If your friends look a little confused,
and shrug their shoulders, that’s looking up. If
they snigger and laugh at it, you may be on to
something. If you have an idea for a business
and it is so good that everyone recognizes that
it is great, you are too late. You may not realize
it, but the fact that everyone recognizes its

ait

Paul Hawken

value is a sure sign. (“I have this great idea of
starting a chain of chocolate chip cookie stores
to be placed in shopping malls where all the
hypoglycemics hang out.” Response: “Great
idea, chocolate chip cookies are really popular
in my office.”) Dud. And the fact is that most
ideas are duds. While you may have only one
idea every seven years, the rest of the world has
been relentlessly probing every corner of com-
merce and service trying to figure out how to
make a killing. In other words, don’t be se-
duced by your ideas no matter how brilliant
you think you are. In most cases, somebody is
already there. I tried for ten years to convince
other people and companies to do what Smith
& Hawken does: import high-quality horticul-
tural tools and sell them direct. I begged peo-
ple to do it. I pointed to sources, indicated the
market, and even offered assistance. No takers.
After four years of doing it myself, I have five
competitors, including Quaker Oats, as well as
the company that originally turned it down.
You see how quickly a “niche” fills up.

Be the market. Don’t try to figure out the mar-
ket—be it. The market is as fickle as fog ina
swamp. It is constantly changing, and there is
not any agreement yet as to how to measure it.
How else can you explain the fact that the larg-
est companies, the ones with the most money
to spend on marketing, launch some several
thousand new food products every year for su-
permarket shelves, and only a tiny fraction
make it? What do they know? If you have a
food passion, and can’t find the right products
to satisfy your passion, you have a much better
chance than Ralston Purina.

In other words, if you are looking for a busi-
ness to go into, don’t. Don’t look. The right
business for you is under your nose. It is as
close to you as your hangnail. There are tens of
thousands of businesses you could go into, but
the one you will have fun in, the one you will
be a hot knife in the lardy world of commerce
in, the one that will satisfy you, is probably

212

sitting around the house someplace. If not
there it is around the yard, in the garage, or on
your desk. It isn’t out there.

Businesses with “being’’ goals last longer than busi-
nesses with “‘doing’’ goals. Successfully starting a
small business does not mean you are going to
be able to stick around. As soon as you enter
the world of business, you are swimming in
the seven deadly sins. You are bathed in the
ambitions, conveniences, and shoddy ethical
practices of your fellow bipeds. Watch out.
But you don’t have to become cynical to be
aware because it is precisely those businesses
that do treat people right that last, not the
creepy ones. In Search of Excellence (CQ 37,
Spring 1983) can be summed up in one sen-
tence: Being a good human being is good busi-
ness. The book has now outsold Roots to be-
come the number-one hardback bestseller. And
what its authors and others have discovered is
that those companies, big and small, that em-
phasize how to be in the world survive over
those companies that have achievement goals
spelled out in terms of size, growth, and
means. In other words, your goal can be “Our
company will provide the whitest nappies in
America.” Laudable. Or it can be “Our com-
pany will be the finest nappy service in Amer-
ica.”” More laudable. Given that both compa-
nies are diaper services, the one with the
orientation to “being” will prevail.

Have fun. This is the easiest and hardest. If you
are not having fun, what’s the point? It is only
a cruel dog-eat-dog world if you see it that
way. If the business becomes a bastion of self-
doubt, suspicion, and grimy Calvinism, forget
it. You are on the wrong path, and your lack of
fun is its testament. A good business is where
people laugh. You laugh, the people you work
with laugh, and so do customers. If that sense
of esprit is missing, perspective is lost, good
people leave, and the business becomes a cycle
of negative reinforcement. This is not smarmy
“aren 't-we-great-people”’ advice. It is the bot-
tom line.

———

JIM BURKLO

Coffee Hour:

America’s
True Religion

From the original introduction
(Spring 1984):
The Politics of Religion isn’t all
spark and spittle; it definitely in-
cludes the quieter side of things as
well. This “exposé” of who really
runs Our mainstream churches comes
from CQ subscriber Jim Burklo, who
does ongoing research as associate
minister of First Congregational
Church in Palo Alto, California.

Jay Kinney

Jay’s original Politics and Religion
section was concerned with reconcil-
ing those two human needs in a cul-
ture which sees them as contradic-
tory, especially for those with a
liberal or leftist background. This
response by Jim Burklo appeared
two issues later and suggested that
for many Americans, the drives to-
ward politics and religion have long
been reconciled. Since he wrote this,
Jim Burklo has become the resource
coordinator of the church-supported
Ecumenical Hunger Program in

East Palo Alto, which provides
emergency food and helps find shel-
ter and other emergency aid for local
people. On Sundays, he’s a traveling
preacher among the congregations
that support the hunger program.
“The veracity of the theme of my ar-
ticle is impressed upon me every
week, ’cause I get to sample the cof-
fee hour in one of thirty different
churches every Sunday.”

Art Kleiner

Her hands gripping the fingers of a seventy-
year-old-man, a child jumps and does a heels-
over-the-head flip back onto the linoleum.
Nearer the aluminum coffee percolator, where
a line of people wait to fill their styrofoam
cups, a young engineer talks about the con-
tracts his firm is seeking while a high-school
girl and her stepfather listen over the animated
tones of a cluster of people behind them. The
church janitor, a middle-aged school adminis-
trator, the widow of a college professor, and a
phone company executive and her two children
speculate on the reasons for the success of the
recent rummage sale against the poor showing
of last year’s.

RULE OF THUMB: The folks who stay after
worship for “coffee hour’ ave the ones who run the
American church.

If you want to comprehend the politics of
American religion, ‘coffee hour” is a first
course. The disparate doctrines, structures,
and worship forms of American Christianity
distract us from proper respect for this infor-
mal time in the social hall after worship. I be-
gan to appreciate the importance of this phe-
nomenon when I tried to schedule a seminar

313

Jim Burklo

immediately after the church service. Ignoring
my pleas to come into the classroom, people
continued to hang out together by the coffee
pot until after several Sundays of futility I con-
cluded that coffee hour was a permanent fixture
of Christian orthodoxy. This has proven true in
each of the churches I have served since.

The Baptists and the Catholics, the Unitari-
ans and the Pentecostalists all drink from a
common styrofoam cup. Coffee hour has a
function in America that transcends the divi-
sions of the church. This is a huge and lonely
country. New people keep moving in, and the
rest keep moving around. The American local
church is an extended family, a clan, for people
whose natural clans are scattered and lost. It is
a family for people who would otherwise be
strangers to each other. It is a place for teenag-
ers to know elderly people, for new parents to
inherit baby clothes, for newly divorced
women to hear about part-time jobs from busi-
ness people, for single newcomers to town to
meet people.

The clan conducts its affairs most intensely
during the coffee hour. Stories are swapped,
dates are made, plans are laid. It becomes ob-
vious over several coffee hours that certain peo-
ple know most of the others. These people, re-
gardless of their official titles in the church or
lack thereof, are the ones who have the greatest
political influence in the church. Denomina-
tional officials make it their business to know
these people and to consult them, as well as
the officers of the church, on the state of the
church. These are the people who can intro-
duce you to other people during coffee hour;
the informal network that is the real founda-
tion of the church is in their hands.

The dominant political system of the Chris-
tian churches of the United States is ““congre-
gationalism’’—local church autonomy. The
Baptists (in all their many flavors), the Congre-
gationalists, the Disciples, most Pentecostal
churches, and many other denominations
totaling the largest number of American
churches are structured so that each local
church owns its own building, chooses and
fires its own pastors, and determines its own
doctrines and by-laws. This system has crept

314

into the Presbyterian churches, the Methodist
churches, the Episcopal churches, and others
with a more centralized political system; these
denominations are giving in increasingly to lo-
cal church demands for control over ministerial
appointments, budgets, and worship forms.
Americans are drawn to churches more because
of their local characteristics than their denomi-
national affiliations. This year, for the first
time, the delegates to the World Council of
Churches meeting joined together in a com-
mon celebration of the mass. Why is this pos-
sible? Because years ago, their local church
constituents concluded that coffee hour was
more important than creedal purity. Christian
hierarchs have for a long time convinced them-
selves against the evidence that they still lead
the church, while the people years ago began
to ignore them while forming up behind the
aluminum urn.

The staggering variety of American reli-
gious forms displayed in the hour before coffee
still have, of course, important functions, not
the least of which is the primal need of any
clan to have a unique, identifying ritual. The
ritual may have lost much of its original in-
trinsic meaning, but it remains potent as a way
for the community to recognize itself. The
hymnal of my church consists of the top ten
hits of the 1840s, but while even the strongest
defenders of the use of the hymnal would be
hard-pressed to explain the meaning of the
words, its value is primarily as a means for the
church to express its identity. Is the minister
or priest or elder really in charge of the wor-
ship service? I find the opposite. Iam strongly
subordinated by the liturgy itself, and thus by
the congregation.

RULE OF THUMB: The more obscure and dated
the worship, the more democratically is the church
run.

Why do more Americans go to church than
Europeans? It is certainly not because our wor-
ship is more meaningful. It is because coffee
hour is as much a feature of our social land-
scape as shopping malls, fast food, and base-
ball. America is set up in such a way that peo-
ple need coffee hour. You can worship at home,
praying before a candle or turning ona T.V.

Coffee Hour

preacher. But what ts there to replace the
church potluck, the ladies’ bazaar, the rum-
mage sale? How many other places can you
mingle with people of such diverse ages and
life-situations?

Iam in agreement with the political persua-
sions of my denominational leadership. How-
ever, as a parish pastor, I know that it matters
very little to my church members whether I
lean to the right or the left, as long as I love
them. The preacher’s political religion and re-
ligious politics can be ignored or affirmed as
long as they do not prevent people from enjoy-
ing each other’s company in the social hall af-
terward. It has amazed me how little I have
bothered people with what I say from the pul-
pit. There are folks who completely disapprove
of my convictions while getting along warmly
with me on a personal level—which is the level
they seek in coming to church in the first
place. Coffee hour does not force any political
point of view on anyone; thus, in a time of
radicalization of the pulpit, the social hall has
become the sanctuary of the church. Radicals
and Reaganites can carry on about anything
from Kierkegaard to croquet as they sip coffee
after church.

RULE OF THUMB: Brew two cups of coffee for
every three people attending worship. This allows for
the abstinence of children and those who had their
coffee early in order to make it through worship.

If democracy is the free and equal exercise of
power by each citizen, then coffee hour surely
qualifies: Most churches do not charge for their
coffee, and you can help yourself until it runs
out. This is certainly the most important form
of democracy—economic democracy.

So, to understand the political life of the
American churches, one must begin by recog-
nizing that their members are primarily at-
tracted by the fellowship life of the church,
and are largely immune to the belief systems
and lines of authority which form their fa-
cades. How many Catholics use birth control?
How many Southern Baptists ignore Jerry Fal-
well? How many members of the liberal Prot-
estant churches that have condemned nuclear
weapons production are still working for the
defense industry? More than the supposed
leaders of Christendom would care to admit.

In fact, Christianity in America is completely
out of control of anyone except this Sunday’s
coffee host.

3T5

KENKE SEY
Burying
Jed Kesey

From the original introduction
(Summer 1984):
Ken Kesey is a novelist—One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a
Great Notion, and something forth-
coming, set in Alaska, {notes for
which appeared in the Spring 1983
CQ}. He’s a longtime cohort and
mentor of mine. I rolled into his
house in Palo Alto in July 1963, the
very week Jed Kesey was busy being
born, and never quite rolled out
again. Unlike many of the famous
I’ve encountered, Kesey and Faye
have always attended better to their
family than to his fame, letting de-
cades go by novel-less but no land-
mark large or small of the kids’ lives
pass without appropriate attention
and ceremony. Sweet solid citizens
resulted—Jed’s older brother Zane,
older sister Shannon, younger sister
Sunshine, and Jed himself looking
most like and wrestling most like his
old man. The living-room rug in the
Kesey home (an Oregon barn) is a
wrestling mat.

The first letter printed here is to a
handful of Kesey’s old buddies,

316

Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Ed
McLanahan, Bob Stone, and Gurney
Norman, who came of writing age
together in the creative-writing pro-
gram that Wallace Stegner ran at
Stanford University in the early six-
ties. Kesey notes: “I sincerely hope
that I do not—as Richard II wor-
ries— ‘play the wanton with our
woes,’ by this display of my family’s
private grief and publication of my
personal correspondence. I mean it
only to suggest a path for others
wandering in similar pain. We've
all got a lot of dying ahead of us. We
might as well learn how to go about
it.

Stewart Brand

It was the toughest thing any of us has ever had to go
through, harder than jail, or my dad’s death, or an
OD on STP, yet it also had and always will have a
decided glory. Partly, I think, because Jed was such
a good kid, very loving and very loved, and the
power of his being carried us through a lot of the
ache. But there was also the support we got, from
friends and family, from teachers and coaches and
schoolmates. Without this support | don’t think we
would have attempted the kind of funeral we had, or
plunged into the activism prompted by the circum-
stances of the accident.

It’s the funeral that I mainly want to share, be-
cause I think you guys and your constituency of read-
ers should know that this homemade ceremony is le-
gally possible. All you need is the land, the deter-
mination, and the family. The activism comes later
but | thought I would include tt; it’s part of the
glory. Besides, it’s attached to two good letters I
wrote after Jed’s death. Here are parts of the letters:

Burying Jed Kesey

Kesey’s
Athlete
Son
Killed

Jed Kesey, the son of author
Ken Kesey, was one of two Uni
versity of Oregon wrestlers
killed in a highway accident in
Pomeroy, Wash.

Kesey, 20, died yesterday in
a Spokane hospital as a result of a
head injury suffered in the Sat-
urday accident. Two other wres-
tlers remained in critical condi-
tion at Deaconess Medical
Center, where they were taken
after the team van, carrying 20
varsity wrestlers and two assis-
tant coaches, slid off an icy, hilly
road on the way to a match and
crashed 185 feet down a steep
embankment.

Also killed in the accident
was Lorenzo West, 20, of Port-
jJand, Ore.

Kesey’'s father, who lives in
Pleasant Hill, Ore., is the author
of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest” and “Sometimes a Great
Notion,” and was one of the he
roes of the 1960s counterculture.
He was at the hospital at the time
of his son's death yesterday.

—San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, Jan. 24, 1984

Dear Wendell and Larry and Ed and Bob and
Gurney:

Partners, it’s been a bitch.

I’ve got to write and tell somebody about
some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry,
you're the best backboard I know. So indulge
me a little; Iam but hurt.

We built the box ourselves (George Walker,
mainly) and Zane and Jed’s friends and frat
brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between
the chicken house and the pond. Page found
the stone and designed the etching. You would
have been proud, Wendell, especially of the
box—clear pine pegged together and trimmed
with redwood. The handles of thick hemp
rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the
lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given
Mountain Girl by Owsley fifteen years ago, gilt
and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, un-
furling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane
was goose hunting in the field across the road
and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to
save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this
in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG
and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled
the brocade into the box.

It was a double-pretty day, like winter hold-
ing its breath, giving us a break. About three
hundred people stood around and sung from
the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had
Xeroxed—‘‘Everlasting Arms,” “Sweet Hour
of Prayer,” “In the Garden” and so forth. With
all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on
his fiddle. While we were singing “Blue Eyes
Crying in the Rain,” Zane and Kit and the
neighbor boys that have grown up with all of
us carried the box to the hole. The preacher is
also the Pleasant Hill School superintendent
and has known our kids since kindergarten. |
learned a lot about Jed that I’d either forgotten
or never known—like his being a member of
the National Honor Society and finishing sixth
in a class of more than a hundred.

We sung some more. People filed by and
dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver
whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross sol-
dered on it. One of our frat brothers put ina
quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every
fifteen minutes for five years. Faye put ina

317

The Kesey Family

Ken Kesey

Jed Kesey

snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork
all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus.
Paul Foster put in the little leather-bound New
Testament given him by his father who had
carried it during his sixty-five years as a minis-
ter. Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while
the boys each hammered in the one nail they
had remembered to put in their pockets. The
Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup
around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses
when a member is leaving the circle to become
engaged) (Jed and Zane and I are all members,
y unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the
boys lowered the box with these ropes George
had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the
first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thun-
derclaps of Revelations .

But it’s an earlier scene I want to describe
for you all, as writers and friends and fathers

. . up at the hospital, in cold gray Spokane:

He’s finally started moving a little. Zane
and I had been carrying plastic bags of snow to
pack his head in trying to stop the swelling

318

that all the doctors told us would follow as
blood poured to the bruised brain. And we no-
ticed some reaction to the cold. And the snow I
brushed across his lips to ease the bloody parch
where all the tubes ran in caused him to roll his
arms a little. Then more. Then too much, with
the little monitor lights bleeping faster and
faster, and I ran to the phone to call the motel
where I had just sent most of the family for
some rest.

“You guys better get back over here! He’s
either going or coming.”

Everybody was there in less than five min-
utes—Chuck and Sue, Kit and Zane, Shan and
her fiance Jay, Jay’s dad Irby, Sheryl and her
husband Bill, my mom, Faye. . . my whole
family except for my dead daddy and Grandma
Smith down with age and Alzheimer’s. Jed’s
leg was shaking with the force of his heart-
beat. Kit and Zane tried to hold it. He was
starting to go into seizures, like the neurosur-
geon had predicted.

Up till this time everybody had been exhort-
ing him to “hang on, Old Timer. Stick it out.
This thing can’t pin you. You're too tough, too
brave. Sure it hurts but you can pull through
it. Just grit your teeth and hang on.’ Now we
could see him trying, fighting. We could see it
in his clenching fists, his threshing legs. And
then aw Jesus we saw it in his face. The peace-
fully swollen unconscious blank suddenly was
filled with expression. He came back in. He
checked it out, and he saw better than we
could begin to imagine how terribly hurt he
was. His poor face grimaced with pain. His
purple brow knitted and his teeth actually did
try to clench on the tubes.

And then, O my old buddies, he cried. The
doctors had already told us in every gentle way
they could that he was brain dead, gone for
good, but we all saw it. . . the quick flicker-
back of consciousness, the awful hurt being re-
alized, the tears saying “I don’t think I can do
‘er this time, Dad. I’m sorry, I truly am. . .

And everybody said, “‘It’s okay, ol’ Jedder-
dink. You know better than we do. Breathe
easy. Go ahead on. We'll catch you later down
the line.”

”

Burying Jed Kesey

His threshing stopped. His face went blank
again. I thought of Old Jack, Wendell, un-
gripping his hands, letting his fields finally go.

The phone rang in the nurses’ quarters. It
was the doctor, for me. He had just appraised
all the latest readouts on the monitors. “Your
son is essentially dead, Mr. Kesey. I’m very
sorry.”

And the sorrow rung absolutely honest. I
said something. Zane picked up the extension
and we watched each other while the voice ex-
plained the phenomena. We said we saw it
also, and were not surprised. Thank you. . . .

Then the doctor asked a strange thing. He
wanted to know what kind of kid Jed was.
Zane and I both demanded what he meant. He
said he was wondering how Jed would have felt
about being an organ donor. Our hearts both
jumped.

“He would love it! Jed’s always been as gen-
erous as they come. Take whatever you can
use!”

The doctor waited for our elation to ease
down, then told us that to take the kidneys
they had to take them before the life support
was turned off. Did we understand? After a
while we told him we did.

So Faye and I had to sign five copies apiece,
on a cold formica countertop, while the ma-
chine pumped out the little “beep. . . beep
... beep...” inthe dim tangle of technol-
ogy behind us. In all my life, waking and
dreaming, I’ve never imagined anything
harder.

Everybody went in and told him goodbye,
kissed his broken nose, shook his hand,
squeezed his big old hairy foot. . . headed
down the corridor. Somebody said it might
be a good idea to get a scrip for some kind of
downers. We'd all been up for about forty
hours, either in the chapel praying like mani-
acs, or at his bedside talking to him. We
didn’t know if we could sleep.

Chuck and I walked back to the intensive
care ward to ask. All the doctors were there,
bent over a long list, phoning numbers,
matching blood types, ordering nurses. . . in
such a hurry they hardly had time to offer sym-

pathy. Busy, and justly so. But the nurses, the
nurses bent over their clipboards, could barely
see to fill out the forms.

They phoned the hotel about an hour later
to tell us it was over, and that the kidneys were
in perfect shape. That was about four in the
morning. They phoned again a little after six
to say that the kidneys were already in two
young somebodies.

What a world.

We've heard since that they used twelve
things out of him, including corneas. And the
redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding
greengage plumtree.

W ith love,
Ken

PS: When Jed’s wallet was finally sorted out
of the debris and confusion of the wreck it was
discovered that he had already provided for
such a situation. He had signed the place on
his driver’s license indicating that he wanted to
be an organ donor in the event of etc., etc.

One man gathers what another man
spillsoey

kk

So, Stewart, we now have the beginning of our own
graveyard—a big basalt headstone, an iron gate
Page welded, poplar trees and honey locust that
Zane and Joy Smith planted. It was simpler to do
than anyone ever imagined. When the guy from the
mortuary came to pick up our pine box he shook his
head in awe. “Beautiful,” he marveled, “and in
only a day and a night. Beautiful.” And when the
county health inspector came out to okay the grave
site that I pointed out, all he said was, “Looks just
fine to me.” Because they are just people—fathers,
husbands, neighbors—and they respect what they see
respected. They didn’t take death away from us; we
relinquished it.

Next 1s part of a letter I wrote to Senator Hat-
field. He called the other day and asked if he could
use it in the Senate appropriations debates going on
back in Washington. I told him okay and asked if I
could do the same, send it to seatbelt advocates in our
State legislature and to antimilitary groups. He said
fine. Since then I have read of stiffening resistance to
Reagan’s obscene military budget requests.

319

Ken Kesey

Dear Senator Hatfield:

. . . From the very first my response to this
anguish has been nagged by a terrible teeth-
grinding of blame, of blame un-laid. I tried to
stanch it. Don’t blame, I told myself. It just
hurts people. There’s been enough hurt al-
ready. Turn the other cheek, I kept telling
myself.

But the nagging kept on: “What if the
other cheek is somebody else’s kid? In some
other slapdash rig? On some other ill-fated un-
derfunded trip next wrestling season? Or next
debate season? Or next volleyball season?
Moreover, what if this young blood has been
spilled not merely to congregate people and
their feelings, but also to z//uminate a thing
going wrong?”

So I want to try to apprise you, Senator, of
just how my chain of blame is proceeding:

I could blame the Oregon coach or his assis-
tants for driving a borrowed rig over a treacher-
ous pass without snow studs, or seatbelts, or
even doors that closed properly. But these guys
are already doing the best they can to scrape to-
gether funds and transportation for a “minor”
sport. I could blame my alma mater for not
funding the activity better. I could blame the
Pacific Athletic Conference for not protecting
athletes en route to sanctioned events, or I
could blame the whole National Collegiate As-
sociation for fostering a situation where more
energy is devoted to monitoring the ethics of
the few “‘stars” in the sports firmament than to
the actual welfare of the untold thousands of
unknown athletes traveling to their minor
events all across the nation.

Faye and I have received more than a thou-
sand letters from around the nation. Most are
like yours—sweet, straight, supportive. Many
are from people who have lost kids or grand-
kids on the highways, like Bob Straub and Len
Casanova. But a lot of them are from teams,
the kids and coaches of wrestling teams, high
school and college. Or the parents of kids on
teams. And most of these letters mention at
least one near scrape. Some speak of worse, like
the wreck of the wrestling bus in Montana that
killed nine on the same day and in the same
area. One member of the Washington State

320

College woman’s crew team writes of returning
from a rowing meet in Lewiston last year, over
the same road that got Jed and Lorenzo. The
girls couldn’t even afford state vans. They were
traveling in private cars. She said she came
around a foggy corner and saw her sister’s car
mashed into the grill of a Greyhound. Her sis-
ter was dead. No one in the big bus was so
much as bruised.

And every wrestling tournament we've at-
tended since the accident (yeah, they still go
on, and we still go; it’s always been our fami-
ly’s fashion) has prompted a parent or coach or
school administrator to come up and speak to
us of their renewed anxieties—the midnight
returns from Glide down foggy I-5; battling
the chiptrucks along the Umpqua; picking
their way across the January passes from Red-
mond and La Grande and Lakeview. In rigs
without seatbelts, without CBs or trauma kits,
usually driven by the coach or his wife. But
what can they do? they ask. It’s hard enough to
pass a school budget in Oregon without asking
for fancy protection. Just not enough money in
the communities. Nobody wants to increase
property taxes, not even for safer playgrounds,
let alone for safer activity buses. Sure, the kids
need to be defended against the treacheries of
travel, but there’s just not enough money.
Where are the already-scrimping schools
gonna come up with the revenue for that kind
of defense?

Then, the other night, as I watched the na-
tional news, it came to me. We were lobbing
those sixteen-inch shells into the hills of Leba-
non. The Pentagon spokesman said he wasn’t
certain exactly which faction we were hitting,
but he reassured us that we were certainly hit-
ting somebody. Then he was asked what each of
those shells costs. The price was something
enormous. I can’t remember. But the spokes-
man countered by saying that the price for na-
tional defense is always high, yet it must be
paid.

And I began to get mad, Senator. I had fi-
nally found where the blame must be laid: that
the money we are spending for national defense
is not defending us from the villains real and
near, the awful villains of ignorance, and can-

Burying Jed Kesey

cer, and heart disease and highway death. How
many school buses could be outfitted with
seatbelts with the money spent for one of those
sixteen-inch shells? ;

I know it’s a radical notion, and I have no
idea what to do about it. There are going to be
a lot of lawsuits coming out of this tragedy;
there will be no other way the Topliff family
can afford a boy paralyzed from the neck down;
there will be no other way to force new safety
regulations. It’s going to be a real tough battle
for a lot of folks who are already badly
wounded, and it’s going to be messy. And I’m
afraid the real villains will squirm away again.

Help deal with this, Senator. Please. Talk
about it. Talk about bringing some of these
umpteen billions back home, back into the
vulnerable guts of this nation where our dol-
lars can actually be used for our actual national
defense. I intend to begin work on it, in what-
ever ways I can find. I may have to join those
old long-haired peaceniks on the railroad
tracks when the next White Train full of nu-
clear warheads rolls across our land. Just like in
the sixties. I guess it’s kind of old-fashioned,
but it looks to me like it’s the job God has
dealt this hand around.

Thanks for listening to me ramble. I
remain,

Sincerely,
Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey wrote about Jed once before in a
Whole Earth publication. It was Spring of
1971, The Last Supplement to the Whole
Earth Catalog, which Kesey was guest edit-
ing with Paul Krassner. He was reviewing
The Bible (“A// of it. All the rest of your
life.”’). It was a three page review, with Jed
at the pivot. . .

Stewart Brand

It’s about four years ago in my hometown of
Springfield. Summer. Sundown. We've just
had a family supper at my folks’ house and
I’m driving my mom’s Bonneville over to my
brother’s creamery. In the car with me are my
daughter Shannon, my youngest son Jed, and
my dog Pretzels. The radio is playing and

Ajiuvy Kasay aq J

Jed, age two

Shannon is prattling plans and the windows are
down to the full-ripened Oregon day. . . .

(I’ve told this tale a lot since, and each tell-
ing has drained a little from the event. I’ve
tried to be judicious in my allotment of the
tellings because of this depletion. I hope I can
tell it this time for good and save what’s left for
my own lost times ahead.)

We're traveling on old West Q Street, which
used to be the main artery to Eugene before the
freeway came in. The house where my mother
and father and brother and I lived all our
school years until Chuck and I left to get mar-
ried is just up ahead, dwarfed now by the free-
way that came by a few years ago like a sudden
river of cement and Chevies. This was the river
that forced my folks to seek higher ground in
the tract house where we just ate. I never lived
in the tract house so the old house up ahead
there on West Q is still what I consider home
in my sentimental mind. I used to lie awake
late across my bed with my front teeth resting
on my windowsill until the sill was gnawed
paintless. I could see past the raccoon cage, the
blinking radio tower of KEED, and beyond
that the friendly outline of the Couburg hills

321

Ken Kesey

where a little logging train used to come from
a few times a week at 11:45 P.M. and then
fewer times and fewer times until, well, I guess
it’s been clear back in high school I can last re-
member hearing that whistle, lying there
blinking out past the coon cage at my mysteri-
ous futures, thinking, “Someday I’ll go some-
place on that train. . .” but it stopped run-
ning and I grew up and now, here it is, ten feet
away coming across the road and the Bonne-
ville is already on the tracks and for once added
power is important and I tromp at least the
front half of the car across before that awful
black noise running on a track red with rusted
neglect ripped away everything from the back-
door back and sent the rest spinning on down
West Q.

Shannon was crying and bloody. The Walk-
ers, our old neighbors, were helping her from
the mangled door. My head hurt but I felt
whole. On the floor my little dog whimpered,
her teeth through her lip. The train was stop-
ping somewhere behind me. Where was Jed?

I picked him up and carried him into the
Walkers’. He didn’t look hurt anywhere but o/
he was such desolate heaviness in my arms. I
sat down ina chair, holding him. And he
sighed, a curiously familiar sigh though I’d
never heard another like it before, and I felt the
life go out of him as though that soft sound
were wings assigned to bear its essence gently
away. My ear found no beating at his chest. I
looked up. There I sat across the room in the
Walkers’ big dining-room mirror, holding my
dead son in my arms. In the middle of my
forehead a two-bit-sized bone plug had been
punched neatly from my skull and hung ona
piece of skin like an open trap door; the hole
and the plug joined thus formed a bleeding
figure eight. I blinked at my garish image and
thought “if anything ever counts, this counts.”
Then I closed my eyes on my reflection and
called aloud:

“O dear Lord, please don’t let him die.”’

Then things became completely calm. Shan-
non was trying to hush her crying; the Walkers
stopped rushing about and talking and waited

. . the frantic phoning paused (things will
make a space). . . then I knew what to do.
Opening my eyes I leaned back to Jed and be-

322

gan to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscita-
tion. The ambulance drivers came in but made
no move to interrupt me, though one of them
reached down and neatly popped the plug back
in my forehead while I worked over Jed. Fi-
nally Jed sighed again, the same soft wings ex-
cept this time they bore the life back into its
sacred vessel.

I knew I had participated in a miracle and I
was absolutely amazed. As the days went by
and Jed drew out of danger in the hospital I
found that it wasn’t the miracle that had
amazed me. That returning sigh will sound
through all the rest of my life and I will be ever
thankful. What amazed me, though, was that
when the chips were down I knew where to call,
and that I knew Who answered. I had in-
terceded in my son’s behalf, and talked the
powers into letting us have him for a time
more, Thank God.

THE COFFIN

George Walker

When I was asked to build Jed’s coffin, my first
thought was of regulations. I was expecting to
have to meet some long, convoluted list of
government requirements. Sealed, Inspected,
& Approved, that sort of thing. Not so, I
quickly discovered upon inquiring at the mor-
tuary. I could not only build the coffin, I could
even buy a kit! The Plain Pine Box, I believe

it was called, and it was exactly that: a few
straight rough pine boards cut to length, a
handful of nails, and simple, easy instruc-
tions. It was OK, but not what I had in mind.
I wanted to build something more personal,
and with more class.

I didn’t have a design to work from, but I
had an idea how I wanted it to look. I drew a
few rough sketches and we started from there.
George Proddock, Kesey’s stepfather Ed Jolley
and I all worked together at building it, which
helped get it done in time, and also made it
more interesting as we tried to think our way
through the many complex angles we had to
cut and fit. This was to be no straight-sided
rectangular box, but rather a complex tapered
hexagonal shape. I thought of our trip to
Egypt as we laid out the plan, trying to dupli-
cate, as my mind’s eye remembered, that exact

Burying Jed Kesey

proportion of the sarcophagi. After several at-
tempts and erasures, I got a drawing that
“looked right,” and we laid it out full size and
cut it from a sheet of %4-inch plywood. This
was to be the floor of the coffin; we would
build up around it.

“Dang, it really looks smal/,” everyone
thought. Six feet six inches long and almost
two feet wide at the shoulders, tapering in at
both the head and the feet, it did indeed look
undersized. We took turns lying down on it
to convince ourselves it was adequate before
going ahead with construction. We still didn’t
know exactly what we were going to build; we
designed it as we went along. I don’t really rec-
ommend this method of building, as opposed
to having a complete plan, as it’s easy to go
astray. My experience in boat carpentry helped
get us over the hard places, as boats are gener-
ally built without straight lines or right an-
gles, and the pieces are hand fit.

We selected some clear white pine boards
for the sides and top. Nice looking and easy to
work with, pine is also traditional. In addition
to tapering the sides in ‘“‘toe-pincher”’ style, we
angled them out wider at the top. This made
the job of fitting the corners immensely more
difficult, as every cut was a compound angle.
It wasn’t necessary to do it that way, but it
looked better, and somehow that made it
important.

I made it on the bevel. . . . A body is not square
like a crosstie. . . . The animal magnetism of a
dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the
seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bev-
el. . . . It makes a neater job.
William Faulkner,
As I Lay Dying.
It also makes a longer job. We worked well
past midnight for two days, carefully fitting

thin redwood trim strips around all the edges,
dowelling and splining the seams in the top,
handrubbing to finish. . . massaging, a work
of love. Rope-work handles were added, again
calling on skills learned in my years as a sailor.
To complete the job, the interior was padded
and lined with a fine old tapestry. All this in
time to deliver to the mortuary, where the
body had been prepared.

It was a very good coffin, as coffins go, very
beautiful everybody said, and certainly a labor
of love. But I don’t really believe that is the
point. The real value of that coffin was in the
doing, in the building of it ourselves. Not in
the coffin, as a thing, but in the act of creating
it, as an event. It made us all feel better to do
this ourselves, to take charge of things as much
as we could, not just the coffin but the burial as
well. Perhaps it’s because, when we lose some-
one close, particularly someone young and in
the prime of life, we feel more than a little
burned that things have been jerked so irrevo-
cably beyond our control. Anything we can do
to regain our handle on events is gratifying.

Whatever the reason, all who kept them-
selves actively involved in getting Jed buried
agreed: we all gained something through our
efforts. We felt better about it than if we had
just turned it all over to the professionals, and
gone about our business of feeling bad. So, I
would say to anybody who feels that they
might want to give it a try when someone close
dies, absolutely yes; build it yourself. Even if
you can’t do basic carpentry, you can nail to-
gether a kit. If you do have skills, you can
make something that will make you feel good
long after it’s buried out of sight. It doesn’t
have to be fancy; simple and neat is just fine,
but do make it strong. You'll be surprised by
the weight.

323

HARRY AND LARRY
INGHAM

The Difference
Between Writing
and Building
Racing Engines

From the original introduction
(Summer 1984):
Harry Ingham recently graduated
from the University of California
graduate writing program, and is
currently a freelance writer. Larry
Ingham had five engines in this
year’s Indianapolis 500.

Jay Kinney

1. When you're writing, your last step is
to throw away everything you don’t like.

2. In writing, the small parts are always the
same, but the large shapes change every time.
Next time you will use the same letters and
even the same words. In racing, the overall de-
sign usually stays the same, but the little stuff
is different every time. If I raced books, in-
stead of writing them, I'd have to start witha
given book design, and then try to make it
work better than anyone else had. I’d have to

324

work over the word and to make it fit just a lit-
tle better, be a little lighter maybe. I'd have

to make sure I got the best and to start with.
Somewhere in between big and little is a place
where the work on books and engines is
similar.

3. Nobody calls you up and tells you that
you have to do overtime because his old novel
blew up and he has nothing to read.

4. The people who claim they can build
better engines on LSD are relatively rare, al-
though the number who claim they can do it
better on uppers is about the same.

5. All engine-building is nonfiction.

6. Engine-building skills and experience are
invisible, but the tools are visible.

7. Almost anyone can write a little.

8. At a party, if you say you are a racing me-
chanic, people will ask you about racing, while
if you say you are a writer, people will tell you
about writing.

9. Ina collaboration, a racing mechanic is
more help to a writer than a writer is to a rac-
ing mechanic.

10. A racing mechanic knows whether he’s
unemployed or not.

11. While he’s at the peak of the day’s mo-
mentum of work, the exact time when he is
full of himself, and can make or unmake the
work of the day, of the week, of his life—at
that moment, the mechanic gets asked by the
boss if he’s busy. The writer relies on his loved
ones to do this.

12. Racing mechanics sometimes get
scalded, deafened, or stuck with tiny metal
slivers. Writers are often driven to drink or
screaming, but then so are engine builders.

13. There is an exact list of the people who
will blame you if your engine blows. If your

The Difference Between Writing and Building Racing Engines

novel inhales its valves, people will be pissed,
but you'll never meet most of them.

14. Racing people get free T-shirts.

15. When asked a question that goes to
the heart of his art, each one looks down and
shrugs, but the engine man shrugs bigger
shoulders.

16. A writer can bullshit himself and every-
one right in the middle of his art form. Fora
mechanic, the bullshit, if he does it, has to be
outside the work. There are agreed standards
for racing engines: they should propel the car
fast, and hold together. A writer can tell him-
self his slow, rickety work is good, and he may
be right.

17. Burned-out racing mechanics fix Chev-
ies at your corner gas station; burned-out writ-
ers quit art altogether.

18. There are almost no women racing me-
chanics, which is bad for racing. There are al-
most no racing mechanics on TV, which ts
good for racing.

19. There are no Indy-engine schools, but a
good talent can find a way to work with a mas-
ter. In writing, very few work with masters,
but schools abound. Neither system of train-
ing works very well, and perhaps neither
should.

20. Nobody publishes reviews of a
mechanic.

21. A mechanic can have his tools stolen.

22. In racing, there is no being good by
playing at being bad, there is no teasing.

23. There are people alive who have met the
first racing mechanics. There are no racing en-
gines chiseled in ancient obelisks.

24. Engine builders are divided between
Republicans and Democrats.

25. Writers talk more, and sometimes
better.

26. Writers like writing letters, sending an-
gry notes, and sometimes even filling out ques-
tionnaires. A racing mechanic hates fixing his
own Car.

27. Writers, given their head, will talk
about taxes, how to survive on a small variable

income, and getting laid. Racing mechanics
will talk about getting laid and smog devices.
(They're for getting laid and against smog de-
vices. They have good reasons for both, which
you need to know.)

28. Writers who have an inspiration can
get up in the middle of the night and write it
down. Racing folk have to try to keep the
golden moment until work tomorrow.

29. A real mechanic can drive to the market
feeling his engine’s concatenated explosions
and steel twisting in grease. When a writer
learns to do this it gets in his way; he can’t read
newspapers or talk to his kids without words
forming into chunks and stopping his
listening.

30. Perplexity takes the same amount of
time, but when he’s sure, a writer can go fast,
and come back to clean up later. If he wants.

31. Nobody ever left a bundle of racing en-
gines, with instructions to his family to de-
stroy them when he died.

32. Racing engines make noise here and
now.

33. Both go to the same bars after work, but
some of the writers think they're slumming, or
perhaps doing research.

34. You've already done the job well, but
there’s a deadline, and it’s time to take the
job one step higher. The way to decide which
profession you want is to decide whether you
would like to do that in a half-darkened shop
or at home, growling at the kids to keep them
away.

35. Some writers go to meetings.

36. Innovations in racing can be tested by
asking, does the thing go faster?

37. When the competition makes a change,
the writer has to avoid it, like the horns of the
bull, holding in as close as he can. The racing
mechanic has to decide whether to use it. Os-
car Wilde thought it was all right for him to
steal from others, because he improved their
work. On the other hand, those who stole from
him were criminals, because their work was in-
ferior. No such conflict could exist in racing.

325

FREDDWBOSGO

Who Do
You Think
You Are?

From the original introduction
(Fall 1984).
A string of pearls fished out of the
Denver Public Library by Freddy
Bosco. It is made up entirely of book
titles taken from the card catalog,
with minimal editing.

Kevin Kelly

As sometimes happens with pieces in
COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY, we
dunno the first thing about who
Freddy Bosco is. It ends this book as
a kind of dedication to the CQ
reader.

Art Kleiner

You all want something. You Americans. You
among the stars. You are all sanpaku.

You are as young as your spine. You are born

to victory. You are earnestly requested to meet.

You are extraordinary. You are happy. You are
my friends.

3,26

You are never alone. You are not the target.
You are psychic. You are the jury. You are what
you eat.

You are younger than you think. You be the
judge. You better believe it. You broke my
dream.

You can always tell a fisherman. You can al-
ways tell a Harvard man. You can analyze
handwriting. You can be a better cook than
mama ever was. You can be a carpenter. You
can be a plumber. You can be a printer.

You can be happily married. You can be
healed. You can become the person you want
to be.

You can build your own sailboat. You can
catch fish. You can change the world. You can
change your career. You can communicate with
the unseen world.

You can conquer. You can cook for one. You
can cope. You can design. You can die
laughing.

You can do anything with crepes. You can do
it. You can do it from a wheelchair. You can
draw cartoons.

You can fight for your life. You can find God.
You can find uranium! You can fix it. You can
get it right. You can get so much justice.

You can get there from here. You can get what
you want if you find it within yourself. You
can get your real estate taxes reduced. You can
have what you say.

Who Do You Think You Are?

You can help your country win. You can hook
rugs. You can improve your vision. You can
increase your heart power. You can landscape it
yourself. You can learn Russian.

You can learn to fly. You can live cheaply in
the Canaries. You can live in an apartment.
You can live longer than you think. You can
make a bow.

You can make a Stradivarius violin. You can
make an insect zoo. You can make money in
the stock market. You can make the difference.

You can make your own gloves. You can mas-
ter life. You can own a business. You can play
par golf. You can predict your heart attack and
prevent it.

You can prevent illness. You can profit from a
monetary crisis. You can quit smoking in four-
teen days. You can raise decent children. You
can remake America. You can say that again,
Sam.

You can see a lot standing under a flare in the
Republic of Viet Nam. You can sleep well.
You can speak again. You can start all over. You
can stay well. You can stop.

You can survive any financial disaster. You
can survive the outdoors. You can survive the
bomb. You can take them with you. You can
talk well.

You can teach music. You can train your Cat.
You can trust the Communists. You can vote.

You can whittle and carve. You can win. You
can win a scholarship. You can wreck it. You
can write. You can write Chinese.

You can’t be an immigrant twice. You can’t
beat the hours. You can’t buy a dog. You can’t
catch me.

You can’t count on dying. You can’t do busi-
ness with Hitler. You can’t do that. You can’t
eat magnolias.

You can’t eat peanuts in church. You can’t es-
cape. You can’t get there from here. You can’t
go home again. You can’t have everything.

You can’t have your kayak and heat it. You
can’t live your own life. You can’t make me if
I don’t want to. You can’t pet a possum. You
can’t print that!

You can’t say what you think. You can’t steal
first base. You can’t tell a man by the song he
sings. You can’t turn the clock back. You can’t
win.

You come, too. You could live if they let you.
You could look it up. You don’t have to be
rich.

You don’t have to exercise. You don’t know
what you like. You don’t need an enemy. You
don’t say.

You fix them. You fly it. You go away.

You go your way. You got to live. You got to
stay happy. You have a friend, Pietro. You have
a point there.

You have heard of them. You have to pay the
price. You haven’t changed.

You know I can’t hear you when the water’s
running. You know me Al. You know what

people are. You know who. You learn by liv-
ing. You live as you breathe.

You look ridiculous. You make America. You
make your own luck.

You may cross examine! You may safely graze.
You meet them in Mexico. You may as well
live. You must break out sometimes.

You must go to Mexico. You must know
everything. You must relax. You must see Can-
ada. You mustn’t weep, it’s Yom Tev.

327

Freddy Bosco

You need help, Charlie Brown. You need never
walk alone. You never can tell. You never know
with mama. You no longer count. You only
have to get rich once.

You only live twice. You ought to patent that.
You ought to see Herbert’s house.

You pay and pay. You reach for your hat. You
read to me, I'll read to you. You rolling river.

You sell with your voice. You shall be as gods.
You shall know them. You should have been
here an hour ago. You should have brought
your mink.

328

You should start sooner. You still can’t eat Mt.
Rainier! You, the jury. You, the person you
want to be. You think you got trouble? You,
too, are a believer.

You, too, can make a speech. You touched me.
You train your dog. You want to build a
school? You wear the big shoe.

You were born again to be together. You were
princess last time. You will die today! You will
go to the moon. You will live under the sea.
You will never be the same. You will survive
your death.

STEWART BRAND

Afterword:
Outtro

Editing is reading. Semicolon. Actually it’s a two-
minded reading—one reading and one watching
the reader read. ‘‘Little pause in confusion there,
what’s that about?” “Hm, you read that sentence
twice with satisfaction, it must be a pull quote.”
“Still turning pages, eh, looks like a buy.”

COEVOLUTION QUARTERLY was founded to see
what would happen if an editor were totally un-
leashed. I would print anything that kept me turn-
ing its pages. I figured I had the requisite skills of
an editor—I was a writer too lazy to write, a reader
still curious about how the world might really
work, and easily bored. I could say no. I could pick
up the phone.

It took me a long time to catch on it was not me
and my impeccable taste that was working, it was
the formula: editor unleashed. Not only would
anybody do, they would commonly do better. Art’s
editing of this book, for example; finer than I could
do by a mile. In case you the reader are getting the
itch to start a magazine at this point, I’ll pass on for
your benefit the lies I was told. It takes a million
dollars to even think of starting a magazine. You've
got to be able to identify your audience in detail in
advance. You've got to find advertisers who want
that audience. You must be prepared to lose money
for three years minimum. All the niches are filled
anyway.

I should warn you that Point Foundation is
currently in an expansionist phase with its pub-
lications.

This book is an empty casket. COEVOLUTION is
alive and well as Whole Earth Review, still quarterly
but mass-distributed on newsstands. Still without
ads, except of course ones like this: a Whole Earth
Review subscription costs $18/year (4 issues) from
27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA 94965. There are
a few innovations, such as the subtitle, “Tools and
Ideas for the Computer Age,” which makes many
readers wish to throw up.

Simultaneously we’re reselling much of the same
info in a weekly half-page newspaper column na-
tionally syndicated by United Features, also fre-
quently called “Whole Earth Review.” Don’t knock
reselling. It’s almost the only way you can make
money off words. This book, for example.

In our tireless research to determine how much is
too much computer stuff, we’ve done a second edi-
tion of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, published
October 1985 by Doubleday. You could even say
that our efforts to swallow all of computerdom have
suffered a catastrophic reversal: we've been swal-
lowed by them. We now publish vza computer on a
teleconferencing system we run for the San Fran-
cisco Bay Area called The WELL (Whole Earth
‘Lectronic Link), unless the customary volatility of
the computer biz has turned the whole project into
something else, like ash. In any case, a new me-
dium for us. Fresh meat.

COEVOLUTION was a name, and an excuse, to
purvey the biological metaphor. Quick, recursivate.
What's the evolutionary perspective on the dead but
reborn COEVOLUTION? Three angles come to mind.
One is what’s called The Red Queen Hypothesis—
running frantically to stay in one place; an explic-
itly coevolutionary current theory that says every-
one’s evolving all the time to keep up with the com-
petition (and also the cooperation). True, true.
Another is the Punctuated Evolution Hypothesis—
a popular recent notion that most life evolves by fits
and spurts, only when pressed by adversity or re-
leased by opportunity, and is otherwise conserva-
tive. That’s us too. The third is my own theory of
evolution: the way you can tell that evolution is

329

Stewart Brand

going on is, you don’t know, and can’t know, what’s
going to happen next.

The last time I was in this position of reflective
summing up was in August 1978. I had introduced
over sixty CQ contributors in two afternoons at
the Whole Earth Jamboree for their five-minute
speeches (Anne Herbert’s Jonah sermon on p. 136
was one). At the end I was exhausted and expected
to Say Something. I said: ‘““There’s some kind of
dialogue that goes on between grasp and reach.

Ten years ago we reached for something with the
Whole Earth Catalog. A \ot of us reached for various
things—some to stop the war in Vietnam, some
to save various species, some to find a way to stay
high. We have spent ten years refining our activ-

23°

ities so that our grasp could catch up with that
reach. . . . But each time the grasp catches up with
the reach and we come to do something rather
well—well enough that it’s as if we could do it in
our sleep—then probably we are doing it in our
sleep. . . . I think all of us should have in mind to
keep various hobbies going that might take off and
become a line of work, and keep working at times
for other kinds of people and in other kinds of jobs,
so that our own diversity can increase and match the
diversity we're trying to bring about everywhere.”
Red Queen says: You have to keep saying it.
Punctuated Evolution says. . .

Semicolon;

_ |

SP OO AA LLL

ART KLEINER

Appendix:
A History of
CoEvolution
Quarterly

Issue 1 (Spring 1974): After a two-year hiatus from
publishing, Stewart Brand (who signs himself SB
in the magazine) founds COEVOLUTION QUAR-
TERLY simultaneously with editing the Whole Earth
Epilog. “J had {originally wanted} to call it ‘The
Never Piss Against the Wind Newsletter’. . .” SB
writes in the Epz/og. “I did have a formula in mind:
we would print long technical pieces on whatever
interested us—the opposite of the predigested pap
in, say, Intellectual Digest.” The first issue is small
(96 pages), and introduces an ongoing concern with
forecasting environmental/energy/economic apoca-
lypse in a regular section called “Apocalypse Jug-
gernaut, Hello.” Other sections carry forward from
the Whole Earth Catalog: Understanding Whole
Systems, Land Use, Soft Technology, Community,
Communications, Learning, and Craft. Michelle
Phillips, Richard Nilsen, and Rosemary Menninger
begin their long associations with CQ as Land Use
reviewer/evaluators.

Issue 2 (Summer 1974): Long (174 pages), perfect
bound (making it look more like a book than a
floppy magazine). Introduces young curmudgeon/
naturalist Peter Warshall (“I daydream of the day
when BOOK [field guides} die out and a strong spo-
ken tradition revives.”) Introduces J. Baldwin, the

source of COEVOLUTION’s ongoing authoritative-
ness on soft technology (known to some people as
alternative or appropriate technology). Introduces
editor-to-be Stephanie Mills, writing on salons (see
p. 10). One article describes the New Games tour-
nament, which SB had invented the previous fall.
The only dramatic play published in CQ, Michael
McClure’s Gorf (about a giant penis aloft in the
apocalypse), appears this issue.

Issue 3 (Fall 1974): This issue is guest-edited by
the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California,
who design it to read and look like one of their
newsletters.

Issue 4 (Winter 1974): Gregory Bateson, whose
work and conversation will form a philosophic un-
derpinning for the magazine, is first introduced to
COEVOLUTION readers. (SB had published an inter-
view with him in Harper’s two years before.) J. D.
Smith, “Whole Earth’s resident cowboy,” returns
from Idaho to be a regular presence in the office and
magazine for the next three years. CQ’s original of-
fices (on a pier in Sausalito, California) are threat-
ened by development, so the magazine moves one
mile north. “You've heard of industrial parks?”
writes SB in the magazine’s Gossip section. “We're
in the longhair industrial dump at Gate 5 now, ina
building called HARVEY’S LUNCHES and as unwel-
coming to visitors as ever. Mail we love.”

Issue 5 (Spring 1975): First of many appearances
by Wendell Berry in the magazine. An article about
Nitinol, a metal alloy that people thought could
make mechanical engines powered from solar heat,
will generate mail from curious would-be inventors
for years. J. Baldwin writes “One Highly Evolved
Toolbox,” a description of his most-used tools; one
of CQ’s most popular articles, it will get updated
five years later in the Next Whole Earth Catalog.
Zentatsu Richard Baker-roshi, abbot of the San
Francisco Zen Center, makes his first CQ appearance
with a transcript of one of his lectures. Later, he
joins the board of CQ’s parent organization, the
nonprofit Point Foundation.

Issue © (Summer 1975): First of many articles on

331

Art Kleiner

the Gaia hypothesis (see p. 15). Dan O'Neill, crea-
tor of “Odd Bodkins” in the 1960s, begins eight
years of quarterly cartoons for COEVOLUTION.
Young hacker Marc Le Brun inaugurates a section
on personal computers—to my knowledge the first
coverage of personal computing by any general-in-
terest magazine. J. D. Smith brings volleyball (a
Whole Earth Catalog office sport) to the CQ office—
two games a day on paid time when the weather's
nice. With the end of large sales of the Whole Earth
Catalog, CQ begins “an austere period, its first since
1968.” That austere period will last for the rest of
cQ’s history. SB introduces the uniform wage—
everyone in the office gets $5/hour.

Issue 7 (Fall 1975): The cover announces ‘‘{Ger-
ard} O’Neill’s Space Colonies: practical, desirable,
profitable, ready in fifteen years.” This kicks off a
debate between proponents and opponents of space
colonies (thousands of people living years in totally
man-made environments in space) that lasts four is-
sues and introduces arguments between ecologists
and technologists that will reverberate in various
forms throughout the magazine’s history. This issue
also includes the first of five CQ interviews in the of-
fice of California governor Jerry Brown; SB intro-
duces Gregory Bateson to the governor, and moni-
tors the talk with a tape recorder. (The other such
interviews will, respectively, be with Herman
Kahn/Avory Lovins, Thomas Szasz, Marshall Mc-
Luhan, and Ken Kesey.) Editor-to-be Jay Kinney
makes his first CQ appearance this issue as a car-
toonist. To save money, SB limits this and most fu-
ture issues to 144 pages.

Issue 8 (Winter 1975): J. D. Smith guest-edits
an issue more hippie-oriented than usual, without
any of the usual section headings; “having been
around the heading Whole Systems for years,” he
writes, ‘and trying to fit things in and out of it, the
categories get melted into one another.” SB and J.
Baldwin visit Marlon Brando and make tentative
plans for a Whole Earth TV series—the series will
not happen, but the interview is published.

Issue 9 (Spring 1970): Seventy-five pages of re-
sponses to Space Colonies. SB asks forty writers and
thinkers to respond on the topic and prints the re-
sults, a technique used successfully several times
during CQ’s history. Storyteller/teacher Ron Jones’s
true story “Take As Directed,” about a simulated
Third Reich in high school, appears (and is later re-
printed in the Next Whole Earth Catalog). Norman
Lear will later make it into a made-for-TV movie.
CQ publishes the first of many reports on The New
Alchemy Institute, a group of biologists and inven-

332

tors doing original research on energy technology.
CQ business manager Andrew Fluegelman leaves

to start his own publishing house, the Headlands
Press; he will eventually become well-known in
personal computer circles as the inventor of “‘share-
ware’ —user-supported software. Meanwhile, CQ
has its first subscription price-hike—from $6/year
to $8—based partly on Fluegelman’s last financial
analysis (“Thank you for a quick pin in our bal-
loon,” Stewart replies in print).

Issue 10 (Summer 19706): Introduces Robert Hor-
vitz (see p. 51), who will become CQ’s “art editor,”
a liaison with conceptual artists. Wendell Berry and
SB quarrel in print over space colonies. “How long
is it going to take us to live down the Space Colony
issue?” writes SB in Gossip. “Besides the Wendell
Berry trauma, here’s part of a letter from Andrea
Sharp’s mom. ‘I noticed what your answer was, An-
drea, on the last page of the CQ about Space Colo-
nies’ {which quizzed each CQ staff member about
how they felt about them]. ‘I was very glad you said
no to them’ (Andrea turns page, expecting moral
lecture). . . ‘California’s far enough.’”’

Issue 11 (Fall 1976): CQ publishes its first special
product, a map of World Biogeographical Prov-
inces (see p. 68). An article by Herman Kahn
prompts SB to change his first section heading to
“NO Apocalypse?!” SB and Gregory Bateson hold
a conference to address the pathology of Cartesian
mind/body dualism, and SB prints some of the po-
sition papers in this issue. Architect Malcolm Wells
advocates underground architecture (‘I do it pri-
marily because it is so beautiful’); his article will
later become the basis for a book about same.

Issue 12 (Winter 1976): Peter Warshall guest-ed-
its one of CQ’s most popular issues, on watershed
consciousness and politics. SB advertises for an
“assistant editor, someone to help me expand my
range’; writer Anne Herbert responds from Colum-
bus, Ohio, gets hired, and makes her first appear-
ance this issue. Her values, oriented to people and
processes, will come to modify the magazine’s
printed sensibility. SB joins Governor Brown’s staff
as an ongoing part-time consultant. “Sacramento,
to me, is Oz,” he writes. “Munchkins, witches,
wizards, the motley band with Dorothy, and all.
There’s dazzling magic. You gesture gracefully to-
ward yonder wall, and PHOOM! spectacular
goings-on. Gesture again: PHOOM! over on that
side. Gesture again: nothing happens. Gesture re-
peatedly: nothing happens. Turn your back:
PHOOM! As Jimmy Breslin said of politics, ‘It’s
all done with mirrors and smoke.’ What isn’t?”

Appendix: A History of CoEvolution Quarterly

Issue 13 (Spring 1977): Introduces a regular sec-
tion-heading on Politics. Introduces cartoonist
Robert Crumb, who will appear regularly in ca.
Introduces C. Scott Van Strum, who will become
Whole Earth’s Learning editor. Introduces Medical
editor Tom Ferguson, M.D., who will shortly
thereafter start his own quarterly magazine, Medical
Self-Care. SB reports in Gossip that Gregory Bate-
son has been appointed to the Board of Regents of
the University of California (‘the closest thing this
state has to knighthood’) and quotes his remarks:
“There is at large among our students the medieval
demon named Accidie—he’s the one who whispers
in your ear, ‘It’s not worth doing.’ The students
have lots of ideas, but they lack an underpinning of
some sort which would let them feel that the uni-
verse makes sense. They don’t know what entropy
means, so they don’t understand science. They
don’t know what a sacrament is, so they don’t un-
derstand about religion.”

Issue 14 (Summer 1977): Introduces fiction writer
Will Baker with “Left Over in Your Heart,” a hu-
mor story about Americans traveling in the Near
East. Publishes Peter Warshall’s interview with as-
tronaut Rusty Schweikart, another CQ regular, on
urination and defecation in space; the interview will
be reprinted in the Next Whole Earth Catalog. Re-
prints a report from Stanford Research Institute
called ‘Voluntary Simplicity,” which says, “The
fastest-growing sector of the market is people who
don’t want to buy much.” Many CQ readers read
into this study either vindication of their values or
a frightening warning that the mass culture may
co-opt them.

Issue 15 (Fall 1977): John Perlin and Ken Butti
find evidence of solar power use in the early twen-
tieth century, material that will eventually become
a book (A Golden Thread). Reacting against at-
tempts by the city of Sausalito to “sanitize” the
waterfront area at the expense of its residents, SB
begins writing about neighborhood preservation,
an ongoing interest that will eventually crystallize
into a series of articles in CQ on the practice of local
politics. Jeanne Campbell, “longtime voice of CQ
in all promotion and distribution matters,” and
“Godzilla on the volleyball court,” leaves the staff.
Penguin Books publishes the first of two CQ books,
Space Colonies, a compendium of CqQ’s material on
that subject.

Issue 16 (Winter 1977): Larry Lee and Scoop Nis-
ker, news reporters and performers on KSAN, a ra-
dio station which “invented the progressive-rock
format,” guest-edit a special issue of CQ on broad-

cast. “How often does one get to edit one’s favorite
magazine?” they write. “It is doubtful that our sec-
ond favorite, the New Yorker, is going to follow
suit.” Jerry Mander’s article, “Four Arguments for
the Elimination of Television,” will later become a
book with the same name. Patty Phelan and Dick
Fugett join the CQ staff; Patty to do “projects,”
Dick to handle subscription complaints and eventu-
ally to write CQ’s popular tongue-in-cheek renewal
letters.

Issue 17 (Spring 1978): CQ unearths the scram-
bled fable “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut” and prints a
popular article on using road kills for meat (both
reprinted in the Next Whole Earth Catalog). SB orga-
nizes a benefit for R. Crumb, who owes the IRS
$35,000 after being ‘shafted by crooked lawyers.”
Kathleen O’Neill, who will eventually design CQ’s
pages, joins the staff. An article called “In Defense
of Sacred Measures” by an Englishman, John Mich-
ell, begins an ongoing argument against the intro-
duction of the metric system into America. The
cover article, about how language can cause or cure
disease—based on the author’s work with acne—
ensures that this issue will forever be known around
the office as ‘‘the pimple issue.”” The second Pen-
guin/CQ book, a compilation of energy-and-tool-
oriented articles and reviews called Soft Tech, ap-
pears. CQ attempts its first large-scale mailing-list
rental and promotional mailing, which fails misera-
bly. CQ’s circulation reaches 30,000 with this issue,
and henceforth will hold steady there.

Issue 18 (Summer 1978): Introduces the “Million
Galaxies Poster,’ a computer photo-map of “‘the
large-scale texture of the universe.” SB announces
the “Whole Earth Jamboree,” a two-day tenth-an-
niversary festival for Whole Earth, held in August,
organized by Patty Phelan. “The last time we had a
party (The Demise Party in 1971), we gave away
$20,000 in cash to the crowd,” SB writes. “That
won't happen this time. Other things will.” In
Gossip he adds, “Of the invited speakers for the
event even those refusing have style—from the
graceful [Ursula Le Guin: “Woe. Alas. Phooey.
Sob.’} to the cruel [Lewis Mumford: “Thank you!
But to escape the Whole Earth Jamboree I'd buy a
one-way ticket on a spaceship to Saturn.’}”

Issue 19 (Fall 1978): The “‘Poet’s Issue.” Guest-
edited by beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mi-
chael McClure, David Meltzer, and Gary Snyder,
this issue is designed as a rebirth of a 1961 City
Lights magazine called the Journal for the Protection
of All Beings. The editors write, “We aimed at an
issue centered on how to liberate mind & body and

30

Art Kleiner

protect endangered species (including ourselves)
from pathogenic industrial civilization.” Partly be-
cause of its unfamiliar format, this becomes one of
the most controversial (and worst-selling) issues CQ
has published. Future guest-edited issues will usu-
ally involve at least one Whole Earth staffer as
editor.

Issue 20 (Winter 1978): The “Jamboree Issue,”
quoting liberally from speeches at the Whole Earth
Jamboree (Anne Herbert’s Jonah story on page 136
is first published here; her reaction to the Jamboree
on the next page also appears in this issue). Sheila
Benson begins her regular film review column,
“Good Movies,” in CQ.

Issue 21 (Spring 1979): SB researches and writes
“Genetic Toxicity” (p. 142): the cover announces,
“New chemicals may have already done more dam-
age to the human gene pool than nuclear energy
ever will.” In the same issue, ‘““Used Magazines”
queries CQ regulars on their favorite magazines. I
appear for the first time, writing about the history
of magazines. Dan O’Neill, protesting a $190,000
copyright infringement suit from Walt Disney for
an underground comix parody he did of Mickey
Mouse, draws a four-page “communiqué from the
Mouse Liberation Front.” It ends by announcing,
“The preceding comic strip is a federal crime—con-
tempt of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Issue 22 (Summer 1979): Introduces former New
Scientist editor Peter Laurie with a regular column
called “Pig Ignorant.” A contributor to the ““Broad-
cast Issue,” Ira Einhorn, is “indicted for murder in
Philadelphia. His girlfriend Holly disappeared in
1977 (it must have been shortly after he wrote [for
CQ]}). . . . This spring, after neighbors complained
of stains on their ceiling and bad odors, Holly’s dis-
membered remains were found in Einhorn’s closet.”
Also, Disney responds to the Mouse Liberation
Front by suing SB, Dan O'Neill, and Point Foun-
dation for criminal and civil contempt of court
(maximum fines: $10,000 each). SB publishes an
open letter to Disney president Donn Tatum in Va-
riety, saying: ‘I’m reserving equal space (four pages)
in the Fall COEVOLUTION for Disney to reply to
O’Neill or do whatever it wants. If Disney parodies
us, I would not mind, or sue. Parody, as part of
Free Speech, is a fragile right, all too susceptible to
overzealous suing. . . . How would Mickey handle
a situation like this? He’d come up with some
goodhearted solution no doubt.”

Issue 23 (Fall 1979): Guest-edited “Oceans Is-
sue” by Mariners’ Catalog editors Peter Spectre and
George Putz, who visit from Maine for the occa-

334

sion. Patty Phelan leaves to manage Planetree, a
San Francisco health resource library and informa-
tion/advocacy service. Anne Herbert resigns as as-
sistant editor to be replaced by Land Use evaluator
Richard Nilsen. Disney offers to withdraw its
charges if O’Neill and CQ promise never to draw
or print Disney characters again, and to help stop
other artists from parodying Disney characters. SB
refuses (“I don’t like seeing copyright law used to
stifle criticism which is supposed to be protected by
law’’) and prints four blank pages labeled “Walt
Disney’s reply to Dan O'Neill.”

Issue 24 (Winter 1979): The “Swastika issue.” CQ
prints excerpts of a major poem by Antler, which
will later become a City Lights Press book, Factory.
Cover artist Robert Crumb, illustrating “Factory,”
draws a cartoon of a factory worker with swastikas
in his eyes. Nine CQ staffers protest; Anne Herbert
withdraws her writing from the issue. SB keeps the
cover, prints her protest (“I think the cover is im-
moral’’) and his reply (“If CQ is marginally different
from other publications, it is partly in our defense
of the contributors’ material from the depredations
of insurance mentality or group-think’’), and in-
vites reader response. CQ prints three articles on
New Wave and Punk music, and SB writes in Gos-
sip: “The show violence of punk is good explosive
theater, exposing a paradoxical sweetness to the
night.” James Lovelock’s book Gaia is reviewed.
“In the brutal/apologetic tones you would use ask-
ing someone to scrub the toilets,’ SB hires me to
begin work coordinating the Next Whole Earth
Catalog.

Issue 25 (Spring 1980): Several articles appear on
Third World culture and politics, beginning an un-
planned but prominent CQ preoccupation that will
last the next four years. These include “Shrama-
dana” by Joanna Rogers Macy, an article (that will
also appear in the Next Whole Earth Catalog) on us-
ing community to tackle huge projects. In response
to the swastika cover, CQ receives “‘ninety-one let-
ters,” reports SB. “Forty-one disliking or hating
the cover (three canceled their subscriptions),
thirty-one liking or loving the cover, and nineteen
mixed, informative (swastikas aren’t just Nazi, you
know), peace-making, or indecipherable.”’ The in-
dependent but allied Whole Earth Truck Store, al-
most out of business, is bought by the San Fran-
cisco Zen Center and becomes the Whole Earth
Household Store. Disney settles with O'Neill and
CQ, who agree to stop drawing or printing mice;
Disney drops its previous $250,000 lawsuit. The
staff swells to nearly twice its size to put out the

———————SSSS.0....n

Appendix: A History of CoEvolution Quarterly

608-page Catalog. Stephanie Mills joins the staff as
assistant editor, alternating with Richard Nilsen.

Issue 20 (Summer 1980): Introduces Ivan Illich as
a regular CQ contributor, with a twenty-seven-page
essay “‘on the fate of Vernacular Values during the
last five hundred years of warfare that has been
waged by the modern State against all forms of
Subsistence.” It will later become a book called Ver-
nacular Values. Illich writes, “I guess that, in 1980,
through no other journal I could reach a comparable
motley readership of unusual critics.” This issue
also introduces economist/small businessman Paul
Hawken, who will become CQ’s most popular au-
thor and the most influential member of the Point
Foundation board. Another article by Peter Nabo-
kov and Margaret MacLean will later become a
book: Indian Running. Meanwhile, the staff is con-
sumed by work on the Next Whole Earth Catalog.
“None of us have private lives or social lives left
worth mentioning,” writes SB. “For lack of a life,
Anne notes, we've gone in for dressing weird—her
tie, for example, sports a paper dollie with staples
in its head.”

Issue 27 (Fall 1980): Everyone is too exhausted to
do an issue. Subscribers gleefully receive a copy of
the Next Whole Earth Catalog instead. The Catalog
is dedicated to Gregory Bateson, whose death on
July 11 will be described by his daughter, Mary
Catherine Bateson, in the following issue (see p.
T70):

Issue 28 (Winter 1980): Guest-edited by Anne
Herbert, this issue focuses on neighborhoods and
includes articles by several previously unpublished
(in CQ) staffers—David Burnor, Dick Fugett, Don
Ryan, Catalog codesigner David Wills, proofreader
Angela Gennino. CQ reviews take on a tone of up-
date-to-the-Caalog, often specifically filling in
niches that the Catalog didn’t cover. Editor-to-be
Kevin Kelly makes his first appearance with a page
of haiku written while bicycling across America.
An article by Orville Schell about antibiotics in
meat will later become a book, Modern Meat. An-
other article by Wavy Gravy, about the Seva Foun-
dation’s work to end preventable blindness in Ne-
pal, will later result in a $10,000 gift to Seva.

Issue 29 (Spring 1981): A compendium of com-
puter slang, taken off the Arpanet computer net-
work (‘‘FLAME: To speak incessantly and/or rabidly
on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a
patently ridiculous attitude’) will later become a
book, edited by Guy Steele. Paul Hawken’s article
“Disintermediation”’ will later become the core of
his book The Next Economy. Typesetter Evelyn El-

dridge-Diaz, who has worked for Whole Earth
since the Last Whole Earth Catalog, resigns to take
care of her new daughter, Maria Francesca. Office
manager Andrea Sharp also has a daughter, Sarah,
who spends the first year of her life watching her
mother work in the CQ offices.

Issue 30 (Summer 1981 ): The “Local Politics Is-
sue,” formally opening up the practice of local poli-
tics as an ongoing topic of concern. This issue in-
troduces Bryce and Margaret Muir, a toymaker and
an anthropologist, who will take several CQ-pub-
lished concepts—disintermediation, local poli-
tics—and test them in the real-world laboratory of
their town in maritime Maine. A Betty Dodson 1l-
lustration this issue of two women making love in
Space, running with a short story called ‘““The Day
They Tested the Rec Room,” will provoke a swarm
of subscriber protest. Working on a Next Whole
Earth Catalog revision, Joe Kane joins the CQ staff
and introduces professional-level copy editing—a
controversial move in a magazine that prides itself
on never changing an author’s words. The second
edition also brings in proofreader Susan Erkel.

Issue 31 (Fall 1981): The Point Foundation loses
some of what it made on the first edition of the
Next Whole Earth Catalog by creating a second edi-
tion only a year later, which results in large returns
of the first edition. The second edition never sells
all of its overlarge first printing, 150,000 copies.
Since the Point Foundation, not Random House, is
the publisher (thus paying for the printing), that
effectively ends income from the Next Catalog into
CQ for at least the next several years. An article by
Alia Johnson (“Stopping the Unthinkable’’) lists,
for the first time in one place, groups organizing
against nuclear war and foreshadows a new wave of
peace-movement activity during the following year.
In Gossip, after mentioning ‘the giddy life in Cali-
fornia,” SB quotes Wes Jackson of the Land Insti-
tute in Salina, Kansas: “California’s too easy. Any
fool can appreciate California. It takes subtlety and
attention and character to appreciate Kansas.”

Issue 32 (Winter 1981 ): Stephanie Mills and
Planet Drum editor Peter Berg guest-edit an issue on
Bioregions—‘‘government by life,” in the words of
writer Jim Dodge; government by indigenous peo-
ples, local cultures, and ecologically distinct com-
munities, all influenced by the natural systems
around them.

Issue 33 (Spring 1982): Stephanie Mills and I take
on alternating editorship of CQ; SB changes his ti-
tle to “publisher.” Most of the major decisions
about the magazine still belong to SB, but now

335

Art Kleiner

other editors will begin to develop major voices in
the direction of the magazine. Pat Califia’s essay,
“Feminism and Sadomasochism” (p. 206) appears;
it will spark more protest than ‘““Rec Room” did.
On the following page, CQ prints letters defending
“Rec Room.” CQ begins a wave of major budget
cuts, under the direction of financial advisor Paul
Hawken. Included, for the first time in the maga-
zine’s history, is the selling of CQ’s subscriber list.
An anticipated wave of subscriber protest does not
emerge. In Gossip, SB reports that the campaign
for metrication, fought against repeatedly in CQ’s
pages, has lost both in England and in the United
States. “Ronald Reagan, in his only known uncon-
tested budget cut, is {dismantling} the U.S. Metric
Board,” he writes.

Issue 34 (Summer 1982): A cover story by Michael
Phillips, “White America is Predominantly a Vi-
king Culture,” will prompt a series of reader rebut-
tals in future issues. By the time they’re done,
Vikings, Celts, Picts, Germanics, Slavs, Indo-
Europeans, Greeks, and Romans will have been
blamed and credited for the American Way of Life.
SB unveils a new project, an adult school called
“Uncommon Courtesy,” with classes on “‘compas-
sionate skills” like home care, first aid, creative
philanthropy, and preventing street violence. It is
intended to nurture a ‘school of thought” called
the Peripheral Intelligence Agency—potentially a
group of hand-picked people with the mission to
“1. Do good. 2. Try stuff. 3. Follow through.”

Issue 35 (Fall 1982): Three articles in this is-
sue—Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift Must Always Move,”
about the healthful practice among Indians of pass-
ing on gifts, Tom Parker’s collection of “Rules of
Thumb,” and Ken Weaver’s compendium of Lone
Star State raunchiness, ‘““Texas Crude’’—will later
become books. The San Francisco Chronicle begins a
weekly column edited from CQ material by SB and
Joe Kane, called the “Chronicle Whole Earth Cata-
log.” Robert Fuller and associates unveil the Mo
Tzu Project, for amateur peacemaking between dis-
parate countries and peoples. Ongoing reports
about Mo Tzu will appear henceforth in the maga-
zine. SB proposes two editions of CQ: “Lite” for
people offended by sexually explicit material, and
“Bold” with full content. “I don’t want to publish
in fear of readers,” he writes. “I do want there to be
a magazine which can publish, potentially, any-
thing. If that’s to be truncated, I want it to be at
least in part the choice and responsibility of the
reader.”

Issue 36 (Winter 1982): A guest-edited section by

336

Conn Nugent, “When Things Go Wrong,” about
failure and misfortune. One essay in this section,
“Poetry and Marriage” by Wendell Berry, will later
become part of his book Standing By Words. Partly
because of the flood of letters about the Bold/Lite
idea (mostly protesting, some supporting), CQ
opens its first regular letters column, called “Back-
scatter.” SB writes, ‘““The volume and forcefulness
and ambiguity of the letters on the two-issue issue
tells me to proceed full tilt, not hang back, till we
find out what’s at the bottom of that whirlpool.”

Issue 37 (Spring 1983): This issue is concerned
with agricultural diversity and includes articles on
deforestation and on an agricultural patron saint,
Kokopelli (p. 267). SB is given a computer to help
him teach courses over a computer network, and be-
gins investigating the world of personal comput-
ing. The first Bold section appears, with “More
Texas Crude” and a two-page short story by a San
Francisco poet named Pheno Barbidol. Anonymous
author Szanto, a strategic planner for a larger mul-
tinational corporation, begins a regular column
called “Real Intelligence,” in which he writes,
“The Europeans view the U.S./U.S.S.R. conflict as
the competitive decadence of two empires, with the
only real uncertainty being which one will decline
faster.” In Gossip, SB reports, ‘So far 190 people
have requested CQ Lite versus 1900 people request-
ing CQ bold—1o percent. A much larger number
haven't indicated which they want, and they get
Bold. We won't know for a year if it’ll pay off {in
extra subscriptions], but it certainly isn’t breaking
us, and it’s interesting to try.”

Issue 38 (Summer 1983 ): Editor Stephanie Mills
resigns; Jay Kinney takes her place. An article by
Robert Gnaizda foreshadows the “simple tax” pro-
posals of the following year. Regular contributor
Sallie Tisdale makes her first appearance in this is-
sue. The last CQ Bold section appears, a two-page
article on Japanese “Love Hotels” by Michael Phil-
lips; thereafter, no raunchy material shows up that’s
good enough to merit a special section. SB an-
nounces two new Whole Earth publications: a Soft-
ware Catalog, to be published by Doubleday in fall
1984; and a quarterly Software Review, to begin
publication fall 1983—“‘two publications evaluat-
ing the best personal computer software, hardware,
suppliers, magazines, books, accessories, services,
and promising directions to watch for... .” A
$1.3 million advance from Doubleday provides ini-
tial funding for the project. Editors of the new pub-
lication are hired from a competitive computer-
writing job market at substantially larger salaries

Appendix: A History of CoEvolution Quarterly

than the normal cq staff. Thus ends the equal-pay-
for-all-staffers salary policy that had held constant
since 1976. (In 1983, most CQ staffers were making
$10/hour.) The change disrupts some of the CQ
staff’s longtime community feeling. The Software
publications and CQ share production facilities and
staff, who move to the new Software offices across
the street from “Harvey’s Lunches.” CQ subscrip-
tion prices rise to $18/year; at Paul Hawken’s sug-
gestion, this is done without a major announce-
ment in the magazine.

Issue 39 (Fall 1983): Jay Kinney edits a special
section on reconciling Politics and Religion, in-
cluding Gary Snyder’s essay “Good, Wild, Sacred”
(p. 282). In Gossip, SB writes: “The Whole Earth
Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly are godchildren in
part of Buckminster Fuller, who died a few weeks
ago, followed a day later by his wife Anne. A few
days after that another friend, the 300-pound “neo-
Stoic” Herman Kahn, died untimely at 63... .
Fuller and Kahn started conversations that I expect
to keep having with them the rest of my life.”
Issue 40 (Winter 1983): CQ runs articles on the
political, financial, and sexual abuses of two promi-
nent counterculture religious leaders. The first is an
investigative probe into the affairs of Swami Muk-
tananda of the Siddha Meditation movement. The
second involves a former member of Point’s own
board: Zentatsu Baker-roshi of the San Francisco
Zen Center (see p. 298), who will eventually be
asked to resign by the Zen Center community. The
change affects many Zen Center businesses, includ-
ing the Whole Earth Household Store, which is
now sold to a Bay Area retail chain originally in-
spired by the Whole Earth Catalog, a chain called the
Whole Earth Access Company. Two months before
the Zen Center article appears, Stewart Brand and
Patty Phelan are married at the Zen Center's Green
Gulch Farm. CQ publishes an Anne Herbert essay
called, ‘It Is Easier to Stop a Slow-Moving Vehicle
Than It Is a Runaway Horse. Safer, Too.” It will
eventually appear in her book Random Kindness and
Senseless Acts of Beauty. James Donnelly, who will
shortly become CQ’s most consistently hilarious car-
toonist, joins the staff as a typesetter.

Issue 41 (Spring 1984): The financial needs of the
Whole Earth Software Review bring budget planning
to the rest of Whole Earth. Uncommon Courtesy 1s
suspended “until Point is fat enough to do interest-
ing charity again.” The CQ products are discontin-

ued, because they drain more money than they
bring in; SB remarks that Products Manager Deb-
bie Hopkins “diligently assisted the very analysis
that ended her job.” Product fulfillment is given to
the Whole Earth Access Company. The CQ library
(excess review copies and research books accumu-
lated over the years) is sold. Meanwhile, the first is-
sue of the Whole Earth Software Review appears—
132 pocket-book-sized pages, full-color, no adver-
tising—to mixed critical reception. A subsequent
issue is better, but gathers far fewer subscribers
than expected. After the second issue, editor Rich-
ard Dalton resigns.

Issue 42 (Summer 1984): I leave CQ to edit the
Whole Earth Software Review. Kevin Kelly is hired
from Athens, Georgia, to replace me. An article
(“Nicaragua’s Other War’’) by Bernard Nietsch-
mann, on the battles between the Sandinista gov-
ernment and Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, will in-
cite so much controversy that CQ will ultimately
send Will Baker to Nicaragua to sort out the situa-
tion. The Whole Earth Catalog newspaper column
begins to be syndicated nationally. The wedding
of longtime CQ staffers Don Ryan (maps, photo-
graphs, paste-up) and Susan Erkel (proofreading,
behind-the-scenes organization, unclassifieds) is re-
ported in Gossip. Two other longtime employees—
production liaison Jonathan Evelegh and librarian
Ben Campbell, the unofficial conscience and all-
around caretaker of the CQ office—leave the staff.

Issue 43 (Fall 1984): The LAST COEVOLUTION
QUARTERLY. Says the cover: “Next issue is Whole
Earth Review: livelier snake, new skin.” Writes SB
in Gossip: “The Point Foundation Board of Direc-
tors, doing its job, said {the Software Review} was
pissing away what’s left of the million-buck ad-
vance we got from Doubleday for the Whole Earth
Software Catalog. . . . Gloom. Financial ee
Hawken brooded for a couple of weeks and then\
made the kind of suggestion we retain him for.
‘Don’t kill the Software Review. Blend the best of it
into COEVOLUTION. Find a new title if need be.
Use the money saved to make the new magazine be
even better, and promote it properly.’ ’’ Coedited by
Kevin Kelly and myself, the first issue of the Whole
Earth Review appears in December 1984, witha
fifty-four-page special section called “Computers as
Poison,” and a twenty-two-page section on ‘“Com-
puters as Tools,” updating the Whole Earth Software
Catalog.

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Design by David Bullen

Typeset in Mergenthaler Garamond #3
with Aldus display

by Wilsted & Taylor

Printed by Maple-Vail

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_ Also from North Point Press:

STANDING BY WORDS
Essays by Wendell Berry

THE GIFT OF GOOD LAND
Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural
By Wendell Berry

MOON IN A DEWDROP
Writings of Zen Master Dogen
Edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi

YOU KNOW WHAT IS RIGHT
Stories by Jim Heynen

MEETING THE EXPECTATION

OF THE LAND ;

Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship
Edited by Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry,

and Bruce Colman

THE DESERT SMELLS LIKE RAIN
A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country
By Gary Paul Nabhan

AXE HANDLES
By Gary Snyder

North Point books have sewn bindings
and are printed on acid-free paper.

North Point Press
850 Talbot Avenue
Berkeley, California

94706

Jacket design by David Bullen

Ten Years of

ontributors: :
| bee Dee
Paul R. Ehrlich 3
og a

— Anne Herbert

Robert Horvitz
- Ivan Wich |

: Harry and Larry eae

Ron Jones
: . Herman Kahn
Ken Kesey —

~ Michael Kimball
, Art Kleiner

aymond Dasmann Ursula Le Guin

NORTH POINT PRESS

| Theodora Kroeber-Quinn

James E. Lovelock
Amory Lovins

Lynn Margulis

~ Stephanie Mills

~ Bryce and Margaret Muir
Gary Nabhan

‘Mark O'Brien

Dan O'Neill
Tom Parsons

— AHymanG. Rickover

J.D. Smith

Gary Snyder

Sallie Tisdale
Malcolm Wells

SAN FRANCISCO